


Pitchforks and Pointed Ears

by red_at_three (elle_stone)



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, K/S Big Bang, M/M, Transporter Malfunction, Unresolved Sexual Tension, de-age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-05
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 11:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/red_at_three
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is sure there's a spark between him and his First Officer, but Spock, ever practical, is reluctant to take the next step.  Everything changes, however, when a transporter accident leaves a sixteen year old Spock, right in the middle of his rebellious stage, on the Enterprise.  As Jim tries to deal with the aftermath of his friend's transformation, the Enterprise encounters a rogue Romulan ship on its way to New Vulcan.  Spock's interactions with the vessel's Commander provide a new threat to the ship's safety--and a new complication to Spock's relationship with Jim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2012 Kirk/Spock Big Bang on livejournal, the masterpost of which, with links to art by kamicom and mixes by amechiro and noiresoul, can be found here: http://ksbigbang.livejournal.com/12853.html 
> 
> I had the original idea for this story in the summer/fall of 2009, but just couldn't get myself together to write it. Like any story that sits for so long in one's brain, the product as it ends up on the page is never anything as good as the hypothetical perfect story one imagined. As with most things I write, there are lot of things about this I wish were better, but, well, deadlines. 
> 
> There are probably multiple plot holes in this story (for example, the issue of Spock's clothes, but I just couldn't resist the image), and I hope that any reader can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it anyway. The title was originally going to be referenced in the story, when I first imagined it three years ago, but didn't make the cut in this version.
> 
> The following contains references to drug use and underage sex, including sex between an adult and an underage person, though nothing graphic.

“Captain, as your First Officer it is my duty to inform you that the course of action you propose is a dangerous one.”

Moments like these are why he has a First, why he needs someone like Spock in his corner. Moments like these, when he’s about to do something stupid because his gut tells him it’s right, are when he most needs that calm voice of reason whispering in his ear _careful, careful_ , that light touch on the back of his hand steadying him. Usually, he listens. But not always, and not when Spock’s words are matched with that slight quirk of his right eyebrow, the one that says _but I will not tell if you will not_ and gives him the only permission he needs.

“Dangerous,” he repeats. It isn’t a question. More like a dare.

“Very.”

*

Bones tells him that he’s getting reckless, and doesn’t even try to be careful as he treats Jim’s latest scrapes and bruises. “You keep this up, and you could get yourself killed,” he says. He sounds like a father, angry and worried, the worry acting like an amplifier for the anger, and Jim doesn’t tell him that he doesn’t need a parent, he just needs something to dull the throbbing sensation in his ribs. He doesn’t need a lecture, either, just an hour or two of quiet rest to get himself together.

“I’m serious,” Bones is saying. “You’re crossing a line, Jim. This isn’t bravery. It’s not even endearing recklessness anymore. This is just plain old-fashioned stupidity.”

Jim considers asking Bones if he’s planning on sending him to bed without supper, but decides against: it’s best not to be a smartass to the man who’s poking and prodding at your bruises.

“The ship can’t risk losing you,” Bones continues. His voice flirts on the edge of softness, but if Jim didn’t know him so well he almost wouldn’t believe the tone. “As your CMO, I’m ordering you to stay on the Enterprise the next time we send a team down. Spock can be in charge. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but I just can’t trust you right now.”

*

Jim’s always been an adrenaline junkie. It’s in his blood; it’s deep embedded in his DNA. He knows it’s in Spock’s, too. Sometimes Jim wonders how his First got this rep for being so put together, for being so careful. Jim knows very well that he isn’t, not always, that he has a deep uncontrollable streak in him, too. He needs excitement and danger and risk and he can be wild, too, and stupid. Oh, so stupid, they both are, really, he thinks as he puts one hand to Spock’s cheek.

*

“Captain Kirk? Might I speak with you for a moment?”

“What? Oh, yeah, Spock, sure. Come in.”

“I have the list of crewmembers I would like to take down for the exploration mission.”

“How many?”

“Seven, counting myself.”

“Your best people?”

“Of course.”

“Good. You’re dismissed, Spock.”

“You do not want to know who—”

“No. I trust you.”

“Jim, are you angry that Dr. McCoy—”

“Dismissed, Spock.”

*

Jim has an old and worn reputation as a flirt, and he can’t seem to shake it. Sometimes he almost thinks it’s funny. He hasn’t turned his attentions on anyone, anyone but his right hand, that sharp and fluent and uncompromising and inquisitive man he would kill for, since the ship took off. But still everyone _knows what that Jim Kirk is like_. And no one notices Spock. They don’t notice his knee against Jim’s under the table at dinner or hear that certain low note in his voice when he whispers words only Jim is meant to hear. They don’t know what his fingers feel like unknotting aching muscles, and they’ve never wondered where the line is between friendly favor and invitation, have never turned over and over in their minds that moment when Spock could have pulled away but didn’t, when he let his touch linger.

*

Before Starfleet found him, long before, when he was just a kid building up the big dreams he’d later knock down and forget, he had a certain way of daydreaming. He would draw planets in his imagination and then grab them. It was a childhood spent in his own mind, a childhood spent in the outer reaches of space, dancing on the edge of the frontier, then stepping over. He had no limits. He knew no rules. He discovered the most beautiful parts of the galaxy, and he stepped back to view them from afar and then stepped close to hold them in the palm of his hand. He was all seeing. He was awed.

So he is awed, still, now, at the sight of this green jewel of a planet. It looks like something out of one of his old dreams. He wants to reach out for it, and see it revolving and revolving in the palm of his hand. He wants to take in every last detail of it with his hands and his feet and his eyes and even his tongue, if it will let him. It is a gorgeous thing, a worthy thing. He stares at it for too many long moments. He forgets, for a moment, that it isn’t for him.

*

It’s plenty dangerous, this—this touch, this leaning, this ghosting of breath against cheek, against lip. That’s why, part of why, he wants it so.

 

*

“You and Spock aren’t subtle at all, you know,” Bones announces suddenly, over what’s passing for breakfast today. The time in Earth hours is unreasonably early, and he’d hate it, if he were on Earth, but he doesn’t attach much importance to Earth time anymore. The numbers are only numbers. He does not feel them.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answers.

“Your relationship,” Bones clarifies. “It’s pretty clear what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on. Trust me, Bones. I wish I could tell you I was lying, but I’m not.”

His friend is frowning at him, half disbelieving, half disapproving, and Jim considers telling him just how much he wishes he could say, _yes, I seduced him, yes, we’re fucking, yes, at the end of the day that man is in my bed with his hot, hot skin and his sweet, sweet lips_. But it hasn’t come to that, not yet. Bones sighs that certain sigh he has that sounds like grumbling.

“Yeah, well if you ask me—”

He hadn’t.

“You should keep it that way. I can’t even name the number of ways that you and Spock would be bad news.”

*

Jim trusts Bones’s judgment more than almost anyone’s, but in this case, Bones is wrong. He and Spock would be brilliant. They’d light up the deep dark of space like a supernova.

*

He leans in and Spock doesn’t stop him. He just stands, all straight back stiffness (Jim wants to take him apart, wants to unwind him, undo him), his eyes scanning back and forth across Jim’s face until he is too close, and Spock becomes cross eyed, trying to watch him. Jim puts his hands on Spock’s shoulders. He leans so close they are almost touching lips to lips and still Spock doesn’t move away. The moment is torturous and slow and sweet, until that second that mouth touches mouth and then, then they are fierce. He has Spock pinned by the shoulders against the wall and Spock’s hands are at his hips, holding him just so, body against body. The kiss is good like few first kisses are, as if their mouths were meant to fit together this way, their bodies meant to move together this way. Their rhythm is perfect, each movement matching each movement like choreography, and he runs his hands down from Spock’s shoulders to his arms to his sides and then around to his back and hugs him close, as if he could lift him, as if that were possible, and carry him away.

It’s over all too quickly. Suddenly Spock is pulling and pushing in all of the wrong directions, untangling their limbs, catching his breath. Jim had been ready to let his own breath get utterly taken away from him. He’d been looking forward to it.

“Something wrong?” he manages, his voice a little shaky on the words. He has his hand up his to his mouth as if Spock had punched him there.

Spock shakes his head, but Jim isn’t sure if he’s denying that anything is wrong or simply denying, denying the kiss, denying the spark between them.

“You know that we cannot, Jim,” he is saying now, voice low and quiet and sorry, Jim would say, actually apologetic. He knows what being let down gently sounds like, though, he’s heard it before and he’s said it too, and this isn’t it. This is a denial. And he really doesn’t know what to say to that. He could ask _why **not**_ , but there are plenty of reasons, and he’s already thought through and rejected them all. Deep down, he’s just a hopeless romantic, and he can’t believe there’s any reason to say no to a connection like this.


	2. Chapter 2

The storm starts in the last hours of the planet’s long afternoon, after half a day of prematurely darkened skies and threats of lightning. This shouldn’t be a problem. It is only a bit of thunder, a bit of rain, a bit of electricity. But the transporter system that the _Enterprise_ uses is notorious for malfunctioning while attempting to carry bodies through inclement weather, and of the seven people who beamed down in the morning, only six have so far returned.

This is how Jim Kirk finds himself standing in the transporter room with Scotty, Bones, Uhura, three lackeys from engineering and the four scientists and two security officers hand-picked by his talented, intelligent, dedicated, meticulous, and utterly stubborn and infuriating First Officer to assist in the exploration of the newly discovered jungle planet that hangs like a jewel just out of Jim’s reach. He should have known that this would happen. He should have known when Spock contacted him, requesting more time on the planet, and speaking in that voice that said he was only using the word ‘request’ out of deference to convention, and no more, that he would find himself here. He’d felt a deep and ugly twisting in his gut that spelled trouble. But he hadn’t listened to it. That was a stupid, _stupid_ decision—his hands ball into fists just thinking about it—and he’s paying for it now.

“I shouldn’t have let him stay down there,” he mutters, as he paces between the platform and the controls, his whole body rigid.

“Ha,” McCoy scoffs, “You know Spock.” His voice is so gruff and so derisive that Jim knows he’s worried too. “If he says he’s going to stay and finish his research, he’s going to stay and finish his research. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Do I need to remind you that I’m the Captain of this ship, not Spock?” he snaps in return, rounding suddenly on McCoy as he does. “I should have insisted he come back up with the rest of the landing party. Absolutely nothing that he could be doing down there is more important than his safety.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Uhura says, tries to say, into the awkward, tense pause after he speaks, but he just glares at her. He’s half aware of the frightened looks he’s getting from some of the younger crewmembers, how even Scotty is eyeing him as if he’s not quite sure who this Captain of his is anymore, but he doesn’t care. He’s angry at Spock and he’s angry at himself and he’s angry at the storm and their infernal machines, and why can’t they just beam him up—it’s the closest he’s come yet in this mission to losing his cool, that calm control he’s so prided himself on since the moment they took off, and longer, since he first felt Spock’s hands closing around his throat and knew it was only his calm that would let him survive.

But there’s no point in being calm, now.

“Scotty.” He turns sharply toward his Chief Engineer, and the poor man actually jumps, and shrinks away from Kirk as he strides back across the room and resumes a place by his side. He leans in so close, one arm braced on the panel just above the controls, that even through the haze of his own panic he knows that he’s utterly invaded Scotty’s personal space. But that’s no more than another item on his list of things he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. “Can you get him back?”

“I’m trying, Cap’n, just like I’ve been tryin’! But there’s only so much I can do.”

“Do more,” he barks.

“Jim,” Bones tries again, but his voice sounds like little more than a light buzzing sound just beyond his shoulder. “You have got to stop worrying. We’ll get him back.”

“You don’t know that. Don’t try to soothe me with meaningless platitudes; you’re the one who’s always saying that space is dangerous—”

“Cap’n—”

“Sometimes things don’t work out—”

“Cap’n—”

“Sometimes people die or are lost or something strange happens to them—”

“Cap’n I think I have him—!”

He whips his gaze around to Scotty and then, just as quickly, to the transporter pad, breath held and waiting, and he hears a sound that’s something like the crackle of electricity mixed with the rumble of approaching thunder, and his breath catches. He’s not exactly sure what he’s seeing or what he expects to see but he knows somehow in that deep part of him where his instinct lives, knows before the figure fully materializes in front of them, that it won’t be the man they expect standing there in front of them, that something, somehow, has gone terribly wrong.

*

“That isn’t him,” one of the ensigns from the landing crew whispers, just barely audible, behind Jim’s back. But he’s wrong. It is Spock, there’s not a doubt in Jim’s mind about it, not even a flutter of a question in the background of his thoughts. That’s his First Officer. That’s his second in command, one of the few people in the whole universe he really trusts. Jim knows Spock like he knows his own skin, all his scars and cuts and half healed bruises, and so he can identify, even now, his Spock in this person who is standing on the transporter pad, glaring at them with his familiar dark eyes.

He can’t be more than sixteen, this version of Spock. He has that teenager’s unformed shape, gangly where the older Spock is lean, not quite grown into his limbs or his features: a boy who will be handsome someday, but isn’t quite, yet. His hair is long and disheveled, falling over his ears and almost into his eyes, and Jim has to do a double take at his outfit, because he didn’t know Vulcans even owned clothes like the ones Spock’s got on. His jeans have holes in them at the knees and the sole of his left red sneaker is starting to come apart; he has the sleeves of his white button down shirt pushed up to his elbows, the tail untucked, the top two buttons open, and he’s wearing a loose knotted red tie. There is a thin silver hoop pierced through his right eyebrow.

Jim takes all of this in like a jolt, the sudden shock of this unexpected figure as visceral as a slap to the face, but somehow, the hair and the clothes and the piercing, even, aren’t what affect him most. There is something else about this Spock that unnerves him, that makes him truly worried, deep down dirty worried, about what will happen next. This Spock has none of the older Spock’s poise and control. He displays an air of insolence, of judgment; he looks at Jim and McCoy and Uhura and Scotty like he can see right into them, and their lungs and heart and guts disgust him. He’s almost scowling, arms crossed over his chest, and he slouches forward in an ugly way. It is this trait, this lazy, jagged, audacity, more than anything else, that most transforms him. 

Basically, Jim thinks, what it comes down to really, is that this Spock is _wild_.

“What are you looking at?” the Spock on the transporter pad asks abruptly, and the too-long too-tense moment breaks. “Who are you people?”

No one answers. No one answers, Jim realizes, because they are all looking to him.

He takes a step forward, and tries to put all of his weight into the step and all of his authority, too.

“My name is James Kirk and I’m the Captain of this vessel, the U.S.S. _Enterprise_. These,” he gestures lightly to the others behind him, “are my crew.”

“Great,” Spock answers, with, Jim almost can’t believe it, a slight roll of his eyes. He’s never heard a Terran sound quite that sarcastic, let alone a Vulcan. “So what am I doing here, then? This is clearly a ship full of humans,” he adds, with a quick, searching flick of his eyes across the faces in front of him. “Are you here to take me away from the big bad Vulcans? Good riddance, then. Take me wherever you want, just know that I didn’t need your help. I was getting out on my own.”

“And going where, the circus?” Bones mutters, just under his breath but not quite low enough, and Jim’s shoulders tense with the effort of not turning to glare at him. Spock hears, of course he hears, everyone heard, and his gaze shoots sharply over to McCoy.

“You have a problem?” he asks, in a voice Jim knows well, and it makes him feel like he’s sixteen again too, because he hasn’t heard it since those days he used to fight guys twice his size out back of the Riverside Public High School, something about the feel of blood dripping down his nose or a bruise forming under his eye that made him feel like he was living, really living, for once. Spock’s moving before anyone can stop him. He jumps off the transporter pad, not running, but taking long, rapid strides that seem to move him forward faster than any running could. He steps too close to Jim, though, on his way to tear McCoy’s tongue out with his bare hands, and gives Jim the perfect opportunity to step right into his way. Spock could step right over him if he wanted, and Jim knows it, even an adolescent Vulcan is too many times his match, but the surprise of someone in his way seems to startle him terribly. Jim takes the advantage. He slides forward into Spock’s path and puts both hands up to his chest. Spock’s eyes widen at the contact. He tries to step to the side; Jim meets him; he tells him to “Get out of my way,” and Jim just shakes his head.

“No. This is my ship, and I don’t know what sort of rules you’re used to playing by, but as long as you’re here, you’ll get used to mine. The first rule is you keep your hands off my crew.”

“He insulted me.”

It’s frightening how young he sounds, just then. Jim pretends he doesn’t notice, tries to meet him on his grounds. Kids this age, he thinks, that’s what they want, and if he doesn’t earn this boy’s respect he’ll have bigger problems than a missing First Officer and a CMO who doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.

Jim quirks up his eyebrows and asks, so low that only Spock can hear him, this time, “And he’s the first?”

There’s a real possibility that he’ll get punched in the face for that comment, but he takes it, grabs the moment and holds on, won’t let Spock throw him, and then against all odds Spock steps back. His face is still contorted into an ugly glare, but without the force to back it up it is no more than the expression of an unhappy child. “You kidnap me,” he says, “and then you insult me. Now you want me to ‘play by you rules.’ Why should I? What power do you have over me?”

“Plenty,” Jim answers, but the truth is: none, except for the tone of his voice and the hard set of his gaze. As long as Spock believes that Jim is in control, it’s fine, he’ll follow. If he doesn’t believe, he could overpower Jim in a second, and it’s done.

“I deserve to know what’s happening.”

“You do.”

“You haven’t told me a thing."

“I know. I can explain. But you need to trust me.”

He’s sure for a moment that this was the wrong thing to say. They’re standing nose to nose, so close and so locked on each other that it’s like the rest of the room, the crew, the ship, none of it exists. He’d been watching Spock’s eyes flick across his face, reading him, searching him, betraying his own nerves so Jim knows his heart is beating too fast and too hard, there under his skin but he imagines that everyone can see it, can hear it. At the word ‘trust,’ that jumpy, manic quality dies out like a flame suddenly extinguished. He settles a hard gaze on Jim, dark and wild and dangerous. He’s not used to trusting. He knows better than that. 

“We speak in private,” he says, as if this were a threat, and Jim nods once in answer.

“Okay,” he agrees. “My quarters. I’ll show you the way.”

*

“You shouldn’t have negotiated with him,” Bones tells him, later, as if Spock were some sort of enemy, as if he were some old-fashioned ticking bomb, set to go off at the first misstep.

“What do you mean ‘negotiate’?” he answers. “He wanted to speak in private. I thought that was a reasonable request.” He leans back in his chair, and fights that urge he always has to stick his feet up on the conference table. It’s terribly adolescent. But then maybe it’s desires like this one that let him identify so keenly with that kid who is, at the moment, sleeping off his high in the nicest bed on the ship.

“And you decided that the best place to have this private conversation was your quarters—”

“Nowhere more private than that.”

“Exactly. You chose the one room on the ship whose security cameras have been mysteriously disabled since the beginning of the mission.”

The only other person on the ship who could get away with giving Jim a look like the one Bones is giving him now, that unblinking and uncompromising see-right-through-your-skin stare, is Spock.

“If you have something to say, Bones,” he answers, his own voice low and his own eyes starting to narrow, “then say it. I don’t have time for sinister implications.”

Bones rolls his eyes, one hand clenched tightly into a fist, and a slight tick in his jaw where he is trying to hold back his accusations. “Why,” he says at last, “are you giving this kid the benefit of the doubt?” He lets his closed fist hit against the table as he speaks, no force behind it, the force pulled back at the last moment so that the impact is soundless, but still, Jim thinks, they are getting somewhere. “Why do you assume he isn’t dangerous?” Bones is saying. “Vulcans weren’t exactly known for being the most peaceful of peoples before the Reformation, and this one clearly doesn’t have any control over his emotions. I saw his eyes before you intercepted him. I think he would have tried to kill me.”

“Wait, wait just a second.” Jim puts up his hands to stop the traffic of their conversation. He’s caught on the phrase ‘this one.’ “Hold on. Who do you think that boy is?” He lets his gaze sweep over the other senior officers sitting around the conference table. They’re all watching him like the answer to his question is quite obvious, and he would agree, it’s clear as day, but somehow he thinks that they’re not all in agreement about just which obvious answer is under discussion.

No response seems forthcoming, so he sighs, and leans forward with his elbows on the table, his fingers loosely twined together. “Okay,” he says, “when did I become the big scary Captain whose crew is afraid to disagree with him? I didn’t think there was any question of who we were dealing with here, but maybe I’m wrong. I thought it was obvious that that kid is Spock—”

“What if he isn’t, though?” Uhura asks. The way she says it, a quick and loud and sudden interjection, he wonders how long she’s been waiting to speak. “What if that isn’t our Spock? We already know that other universes exist, and that we can’t assume anything about them based on what we know from ours. What if he’s from some other universe where, for example, Vulcan never went through a Reformation—”

“I think they would have killed each other off long before Spock’s birth.”

“Or where he grew up on Earth—”

“He didn’t.”

Uhura purses her lips. He’s crossed a line, he supposes. Spock has a way, when he’s around, of clearing his throat, of touching Jim’s knee under the table, sometimes, when he’s said just short of too much, that pulls him back unfailingly. Thinking of it now, those slight signs between them, he feels a kick of fear straight to his gut, a low, ugly, alarm in his intestines. It’s the first time he’s considered the possibility that they won’t be able to bring back the adult Spock they know. It feels like standing on the deck of a sinking ship, watching the last lifeboat drift away from you, knowing you’re not on it but not quite believing, yet, that the water will swallow you up.

The moment passes with a quick shake of the head, the fear with it, and the memory smells of melodrama and panic. “Not all of us,” Uhura is saying, “have had the benefit of a personal conversation with him to help us in our theories.”

“And not all of us are Captain,” he adds, a quick shot volleyed out of habit. Then he takes a deep breath. “Look.” He runs his tongue over his lips, slowly, thoughtfully, an old habit he hasn’t broken. “I think what we have is just a younger version of our Spock, our First Officer, but it doesn’t matter if all of you think differently or not. It comes out to the same thing. Dr. McCoy is right that this kid doesn’t have control over himself, and that makes him—” He hesitates; the words he has to say taste of sticky, black tar. “That makes him a potential threat to this vessel and her crew. What we need to do now is keep a close eye on him, not antagonize him,” he shoots a glance at Bones, subtle but noticeable, even though he doesn’t blame him because he knows that Bones reacted the way he did because he feels in his gut just what Jim does, that this is their own familiar Spock beneath the piercing, the ripped jeans, the sneakers, “and find a way to fix this situation as soon as possible. Scotty,” he slams his palm down on the table to punctuate the word, and turns his chair sharply to the left to put the spotlight on his Chief Engineer. “You have any ideas?”

Scotty starts at the sound of his name, as if he hadn’t been expecting all of the attention in the room to turn so suddenly to him. “Oh, well,” he says, with a little clear of his throat, a hesitant pause, “obviously the problem occurred because the storm interfered with the transporter technology.”

Jim waits a beat, two, to learn something that he doesn’t know. But Scotty just stares back at him with the expression of a schoolboy who is hoping that if he sits perfectly still, his teacher won’t think to call on him again.

“Okay,” Jim says slowly. “I figured that was the case. I was just sort of wondering if you had any thoughts on how we could fix that problem?”

“Oh.” Scotty scrunches up his face, thinking, and taps his fingers against the table, and makes a vague humming noise, and then finally, finally, admits, “No. Sorry, Capt’n, but I don’t think it can be done. I’d have to recreate the conditions of the storm perfectly, and even then, I couldn’t make you any promises. We could end up with…an elderly Spock, or an evil Spock, or a Klingon Spock, or—”

“Okay,” Jim cuts him off, both hands held up and his head bent down. “I get it. But you’re going to try anyway, right? Because we aren’t—we can’t exactly raise him again, can we?”

“We could always send him back to Ambassador Sarek,” Bones suggests lightly, but at the mention of the name, Jim jolts.

“Oh, shit.”

He doesn’t even care that Starfleet Captains aren’t supposed to swear in the middle of important meetings with their senior officers. Starfleet Captains aren’t supposed to lose their First Officers to unexpected adolescence, either, and extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary vocabulary. What he’s realized is that the situation is worse than he’d thought, more complicated, messier, and with higher stakes. He vaguely hears Uhura asking him what’s wrong. He takes his hand from his face and slumps back in his chair.

“What are we supposed to tell him about Vulcan?”

He lets his gaze rest on each face in turn, but again and again he finds nothing but unsure expressions, as sad and lost as he feels himself.

Then Uhura says, “Nothing,” with such confidence and certainty that he would not have believed, had he not seen it himself, that a minute ago she was staring down at her hands, her eyes closed, a position like that of mourning.

“Nothing?”

“Why should we? It will upset him and confuse him. And it could be dangerous. If he’s just our own Spock, de-aged, it won’t be a problem, but what if he is from another universe? If we fix the transporter and send him back to his own time with the belief that Vulcan is destroyed, what do you think he will do? If it’s a universe in which Vulcan still exists, he’ll be seen as a lunatic.”

“Considering how strict Vulcan society is in our universe,” Bones adds, “and if it’s anywhere close to as severe in his, there are probably already plenty of Vulcans who think that about him."

“And ranting about Nero would give them the perfect excuse to have him committed,” Jim finishes. “If he is from another universe, there’s no way we can send him back if he has any knowledge of what happens in the future.”

“And there’s no way to say for sure whether he’s an alternate universe Spock, or our Spock de-aged,” Uhura adds. She doesn’t say that Jim’s gut feeling isn’t good enough. But he isn’t about to make the argument that it is, not with the stakes this high.

“Okay,” he says finally. This is the voice he practices in the privacy of his room, trying to sound like a real captain should, but he’s not thinking about those quiet hours now, nor that secret insecurity. He does not feel it. “Okay. So we have a plan. We keep Spock occupied and as isolated as possible, we don’t let him know anything about Vulcan or about his role on this ship, and we work as hard as possible,” and he spares one glance, here, at Scotty, a glance like an order, implying its own swift yes sir, “to get our own Spock back as soon as we can.”

“How are we going to keep secrets from this Spock, though?” Uhura asks him. “He’ll be curious about everything, and I doubt he’ll accept ‘we can’t tell you’ for an answer. Are you just going to lock him in your quarters until the transporter is fixed?”

It’s an awkward question, with a subtle bite that he could never point out, that she would never admit to, but no one staring at him now knows how close it hits or what it means. “I don’t think that would be wise,” he mutters, and then, just barely audible, “Believe me,” but before he can think any more, before anyone else can imagine, and they won’t ask and he won’t volunteer, they are startled by the sudden appearance of Ensign Chekov’s face on the computer monitor at the center of the table.

“I am sorry to interrupt, Keptin, but I believe there is something on the bridge that you should see.”

Vague warnings are the worst warnings one can receive. He almost does not want to ask what he will see on that bridge, a cold tugging of certainty at the back of his skull that he already knows what Chekov will tell him, the basic outline if not all of the detail. He knows that it will be Spock, somehow Spock, causing trouble on a scale even Jim at sixteen couldn’t have fathomed.

“Something?” he repeats. “Care to be a bit more specific there, Ensign?”

“It’s a ship,” Chekov answers, his eyes wide in his still teenage face. “It’s a Romulan ship.”

 _Well_ , he thinks, _that is unexpected_.

Out loud, he says only, “Fuck me.”


	3. Chapter 3

_two hours earlier_

Spock takes his time, after Jim lets him in, wandering between the desk and the bed and examining the shelves. He flips through Jim’s books. He turns over the leaves of his plants. He looks at his own reflection in the mirror, runs his hands through his hair, twice, then scowls at himself and turns away. He takes notice of the computer, but does not turn it on. He sits on the bed. “So this is what a Captain’s quarters look like?” he says, one eyebrow arched.

“You’re not impressed,” Jim observes, as he leans in the doorway of the wall that half-divides his bedroom from his working space, watching him with a patience that says he has all the time in the world, he’s rich with it.

“I imagine it’s a step up from everyone else’s sorry little rooms,” Spock another, and looks around one more time. Then, fingers running absently back and forth across the bedspread, and his gaze down at his shoes, he asks, “So why did you bring me here?” It doesn’t even matter that he adds, just after, “Because if you have some sort of agenda you’re doing a terrible job of following it through, you know. I’ve been walking all over you,” because in that question, he had allowed into his voice just enough vulnerability, just enough uncertainty, to remind Jim of what position Spock is in: a teenager, scared and alone and with no idea what is happening around him, to him, and he wonders what Spock thinks he was doing, before his body disappeared on him and he found himself on this strange ship, what his last memories are.

“Well,” he says, like it’s just some casual thing, “if you can believe me, there is no agenda here.”

“I don’t,” Spock answers and then adds, with an awkwardness he tries to hide with harshness, “believe you. I don’t believe you.”

“It’s just a mistake,” Jim shrugs. “One of our Officers was down on that planet collecting data. We wanted to beam him back onto the ship, but the storm interrupted our transporter’s signal. We got you instead.” He says all of this as if he were a waiter reciting a menu, just exactly that voice he used to put on to give the Riverside Café specials, but Spock just stares back at him with his eyes narrowed and two spots of color high on his cheeks, his hands now formed into fists and creasing the bedspread between his knuckles.

“One of your Officers is on Vulcan?” he repeats.

“No. We’re not circling Vulcan.”

“What? How did you—how did you _move me_ —” He cuts off his own words and jerks his head sharply to the side, and Jim can see his chest expand and fall with his deep breaths. “What the _fuck_ is going on here?” he snarls.

“Look, just calm down—”

“You calm down!”

Before Jim can even blink, Spock’s on his feet again, striding once toward him and pinning him against the wall, arms to either side of him like a cage, hands on the wall just above his head. “You’re playing a game with me,” he says. “I don’t like that. I just want the truth. Is this my Father’s plan? Is he sending me away? He’s always saying he will. I call his bluff each time, I tell him just do it, if you’re so ashamed of me then just ship me off to Earth, I don’t care. Has he decided to do it? Are you in on this with him? Just tell me where you’re taking me. I can handle it. Just tell me.”

What’s important now, Jim thinks, is not to show his fear. He stares back at Spock as if he finds his hysterics funny, a simple, childish tantrum.

“We’re not taking you anywhere,” he says. “This was a mistake. But we’re going to fix it. Just trust me.”

“ _Trust_ you. You keep saying that: trust you, trust you—why should I? What’s so trustworthy about _you_?” He says this last word as if it were the name of some disgusting bug he’d found squashed to the bottom of his shoe, his face so close to Jim’s and his body so close it’s indecent and uncomfortable, and he focuses on Spock’s shoulder, not the blush of green across his chest, visible where his shirt is unbuttoned, but his shoulder, a safe and neutral space. He doesn’t dare breathe until Spock pushes his body roughly away and turns so that Jim is staring, now, only at his back. “Fuck,” he says, almost screams, and whacks at one of Jim’s plants so that it falls with a high pitched shattering, splintering, sound against the floor. Other swear words follow, mostly in Vulcan, which Jim follows only vaguely.

He waits this out, too. His reaction would hardly be any better, any quieter, any more controlled, if he were the one suddenly on some strange ship, surrounded by strange people, and so he tries to have sympathy. He tries to be understanding and patient and mature, because someone has to be, and this time it’s not Spock, his controlled and logical and stiff backed First Officer who always pulls himself back first when they stand on the edge together. This time it can’t be Spock, so it must be Jim, and he can rise to that occasion. But even more than that he knows what it feels like to lash out like this; he knows that the target is never the other person in the room, and all you want, when you let go, is for that other person, that surrogate, to give you a reason, any reason in the universe, to take out everything all at once and on him. He can’t afford to be Spock’s target practice. So he keeps still, keeps watch. He waits.

Slowly, Spock sinks down to the floor. He folds his arms over his head, so that he looks just like a small child hiding, so that he pulls at Jim’s heart.

Jim takes a tentative step forward.

“The Vulcans I know,” he starts, voice so quiet, his hand held out but Spock cannot see, curled up and his back to Jim still, “they often find meditation helpful—”

“Fuck meditation,” Spock snarls. “Fuck control, too. Fuck barriers, and mental blocks, and all of that, all of it. Do you know what that is? It’s a sedative, a tranquilizer. Would you prefer not to feel? Would you prefer to just be _dull all the time_?”

Jim lets his hand drop back down to his side.

He doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t know what to say, and Spock doesn’t speak either and he doesn’t move. Jim finds that he’s dropped to his knees. Spock is rocking back and forth, the slightest of movements, his body curled into a ball and Jim cannot reach him.

“Just…do what you want,” Spock says. The words sound like they’re choking him. He clears his throat, tries again. “Do whatever. Take me to Earth. I want to go. Vulcan is…it’s like living in a straightjacket. So repressed. So…stiff. You don’t know how much I want to escape. It’s so boring. And no one ever tells the truth. I bet you think we don’t lie. I hear that’s a thing, about us, that we don’t lie, but everyone keeps their emotions so—tied up—that’s a form of lying. I’d rather tie up my limbs.” He lifts his head, now, and twists sideways so he’s looking at Jim properly, now. There are light tracks of tears down his face, and Jim drops his gaze as soon as he notices them, ashamed. “Sometimes,” Spock is saying, “I do. You ever do that, Captain Kirk?”

“Wh—what?” he sputters, completely upended by this sudden shift in tone, and now Spock has twirled around completely so that he is sitting facing Jim, his legs crossed in the pose he uses to meditate, twisted around themselves as if by instinct and Jim focuses on this, this one familiar thing.

“You seem like a real professional guy,” Spock is saying. “But I know a lot of ‘professional men.’ He sneers as he says these last words, makes them ugly, insulting. “I know that everyone has different sides to them. Everyone has secrets. I can tell you’re passionate. I like that.”

He’s leaning in, now, a little more with each sentence, and as he moves forward Jim moves back, but it’s like he’s moving through water, or forcing his way back through ice, and he cannot move fast enough. His skin prickles.

“Spock—”

“You know who I am!” The excitement in his voice makes him sound young. Jim cannot look at his face. “So I am here on purpose. Just tell me the truth, Captain Kirk, I can handle it. Just tell me—”

As he’s talking, Jim is trying to move, starting to stand, but he isn’t quick enough, and suddenly Spock’s hands are around his wrists and something is in his brain, and he doesn’t know what it is, except that it’s familiar, almost, part memory and part fantasy, heat, touch, body against body, his First Officer’s mouth opening under his, sweet ghost of tongue—and then it’s gone.

He’s standing. He’s shaking. His skin feels like it’s burning where Spock has touched him, and he knows he’s imagining it, knows this is all in his head, but that doesn’t make the feeling any less, doesn’t make it any easier to breathe.

“ _Woah_ ,” Spock says. Jim forces himself to look up, and he sees that Spock is standing, too, shaking out his hand as if it, too, were burned, and his eyes are wide, the expression on his face amazed. “You want me,” he says, like it’s a revelation. “I saw it all. You do.”

“No, no—you don’t understand,” he tries to answer, and damns the tremor in his voice. Damn the way the space is sliding away between them, Spock stepping closer again, the way he does not sound like an adult, can’t sound like one, isn’t one.

“No,” Spock echoes, this time a gross twisting of words. He reaches out again; Jim flinches away. “It’s okay.” His voice is soft and desperate and terrible. “It’s okay, if you do.”

“You can’t be more than sixteen—”

“Sixteen and four months,” he says. Only children count their ages that way, Jim thinks, bile rising in his throat. The feeling is worse for the realization that he has backed himself against the wall. He forces himself to step forward, be insistent, be in control.

“Spock,” he says, “I’m serious. I’m not hitting on you. I’m not attracted to you. I’m too old for you.”

Spock just tilts his head. “You say that,” he says, “but it isn’t true. I know you’re attracted to me. It’s okay.” He takes another step forward; Jim sidesteps him this time, won’t let himself be caught again. “The age difference is nothing. I’ve been with older men before.”

He says this like it’s something to be proud of, and Jim feels another swell of sickness in him. He half-blinks, eyelids lowered and gaze down, and gathers himself up again, gathers himself up like one gathers in breath. He ignores that seasick tumbling. He squares his shoulders, hands behind his back, perfect Officer posture and Captain’s stern expression, and he starts to circle around Spock, which makes him feel uncomfortably like a predator with his prey. Spock turns with him, following his movements. He wants to look like he’s thinking, but he isn’t, because it’s already decided, knows what he needs to do. “Spock,” he says finally, not even deigning to look up from where he is examining his shoes, as if they were so interesting, so important. “Do you remember what I told you in the transporter room?”

_He wants to look tough, but he’s vulnerable. He knows it, he uses it to his advantage, he’s used to men who are bigger and stronger and more powerful than he is, and he thinks he knows what they want and how to act for them. Use it, use that._

“Lots of things,” Spock answers.

_He’s tense, but eager._

“What was the most important thing?”

“I don’t know. Stop playing with me.”

“That’s what you want?” He looks up abruptly, now, and catches Spock off balance with just his gaze. He stops pacing. He stands closer than he wants to, not as close as Spock would want him to. “No games? I thought you’d find this _fun_.”

“I don’t. You’re stalling. I’m not stupid, Captain Kirk—”

“I never said you were.”

“I just want to enjoy myself! I don’t want to live with…with restrictions, and all of these rules. I want to be honest. I can tell, you—you hide everything. Don’t you get bored, Captain Kirk, living by the rules all the time? Don’t you just want to break out?”

His jaw is clenched so tightly that it’s painful, locking back everything he cannot say. “You have no idea,” he whispers.

Spock laughs, humorless and dry, at this, and tells him, “I’m from Vulcan. You’re the one who has no idea.” His voice sounds strangely small, and just at the end of the last word, like a new form of punctuation, he flinches. He starts to shake his head now, back and forth and so, whispers, “No idea again,” and slowly the movement of his head starts to lead all the way down his body until he is swaying, and Jim notices that, at some unknown moment, he had closed his eyes.

“Are you all right, Spock?” he asks, taking one step closer, one hand out as if this could stop him from falling, and Spock answers, “No,” and steps back, and Jim grabs for him and pulls him forward, toward the bed, where he falls with an ungraceful flump, his eyes still closed. Jim sits down with him. It’s his instinct now, an instinct he follows without even the pause to question, to put his hand on Spock’s shoulder, to use touch to comfort. At first, Spock does not even seem to notice. He sits incredibly still. For the first time since he appeared, all of sixteen and in his jeans and loose-knotted tie and falling apart red shoes, he looks like the Spock Jim knows. He looks familiar. His features are set and there is a forced calm there, in the set of his lips and the line of his back and the way he holds his hands still on his knees; he is gathering himself, putting himself back together, and Jim just waits, fingers rubbing gently into shoulder now, as if this really were his Spock, as if this were no different than any other touch that they allow themselves, Spock’s fingers working out the knots in his shoulders, or Jim’s hand circling carefully at the small of Spock’s back.

“Are you all right?” he asks again.

“Yes,” Spock answers this time. He still doesn’t open his eyes, but he does move his hand, without comment, to rest on Jim’s knee.

“Spock—” 

“You are kind, I think.” These words, the last that Jim expected to hear, startle him and make him almost forget the hand he was about to move from his leg. Still he does, touching gently, aware that this touch for Spock means something more than it does for him, and Spock does not fight the movement; he does not seem to acknowledge it at all. “I like that,” he says. “Kindness.”

He’s standing on a tightrope, a thin wire; he could gain Spock’s trust, if he’s careful enough, or he could slip and fall and lose any opportunity to reach him. “Maybe you should rest,” he suggests quietly, and braces himself, and anticipates that this will be, again, the wrong thing.

Spock only nods. “Did you know it was…” he mumbles, and then something unintelligible in Vulcan, and then, “sorry fuck,” and more harsh-edged words in a tongue Jim doesn’t know. He takes his hand, finally, away from Spock’s shoulder, and he does not even have to prompt him to lie down, he does it on his own, and curls up into himself as soon as his head hits the pillow. The movement is automatic, like someone pressed a button on him, commanding him to fold up into this almost perfect rectangle of awkward teen limbs and flat soled feet.

Jim doesn’t kneel down to look at his face, doesn’t watch him as he sleeps, because he’s surely sleeping now, he can see it in the regular rhythm of his breathing and the flutter of his eyes behind the lids, and he doesn’t search his relaxed features for some sign of his own Spock, who he has never seen sleeping, who has never been in his bed. He doesn’t do any of these things. He leaves.

*

No one takes him up on his offer, so instead he has to deal with the ship. It’s nothing impressive, when it comes right down to it, clearly Romulan in manufacture but not a fighter, neither a warship nor an exploratory vessel. Jim’s surprised it’s even made it this far into space: they’re nowhere near Romulus, or even the neutral zone, which is only part of why he feels like this sudden appearance is a cruel trick being played on him purposefully by some powerful, malicious being beyond his understanding. At first, he just watches it. He stands behind his Captain’s chair, leaning with two hands on the back of it, just watching that tiny ship floating there in front of him, and he knows it’s nothing to be scared of when he’s in the _Enterprise_ , by far the bigger and more powerful of the two, but still it makes him uneasy. He needs to stare it down. He needs to get himself together. He needs to be thinking about this and not about Spock, his Spock, lost, or the other Spock, waiting. 

“Lieutenant,” he says abruptly, with no more than a half turn to Uhura, a jerk of his head in her direction, “can we contact them?”

“I have their frequency, no guarantee they’ll respond,” she answers.

“Try anyway.”

He doesn’t actually expect an answer. He doesn’t expect any answer at all and certainly not the one that he gets, a beautiful young woman, pointy ears and eyebrows and cold eyes and long dark hair, staring down her nose at him. “What a surprise,” she says, in a heavily accented Standard, and it’s almost funny, how that is exactly what he was thinking.

He crosses his arms against his chest and spreads his feet out; he thinks of it as a fighting stance but still there’s that voice in his head telling him, it’s a defensive one.

“Is it?” he asks. “My name is Captain James Kirk of the U.S.S. _Enterprise_ and your vessel has entered Federation space. It is your presence here that is the surprise, not ours.”

“I take it you do not consider this a pleasant surprise?” Her mouth quirks up on one side as she asks the question. He recognizes the gesture. So right away he knows that she’s good. She’s good and she’s gorgeous and she could kill a man with one of her nails alone, they’re so sharply pointed, and the smile is flirty, yes, but it’s dangerous too. He feels a little thrill.

“I think you’re aware,” he answers, starting to walk, circling to the front of his chair with long and lazy steps, and looking down more at the floor than at her, because she doesn’t warrant his glance and he wants her to know it, “that you’ve crossed the neutral zone. And I think you’re also aware that your ship isn’t any match for my ship. If I wanted to,” and here he does raise his eyes, smiles all the way up to them, the same smile he’d give if they were in some Riverside dive and he was trying to pick her up, and she may not know Riverside or dives but she knows that smile—“If I wanted to, I could order your ship destroyed right now, and I’d be within my rights to do so.”

“But you haven’t yet,” she points out archly.

“I try to be merciful."

“Mercy.” She spits out the word like it disgusts her. “If our positions were reversed, I would you show you no mercy.”

“Good thing for us both that they’re not, then. Look,” he says, and leans his hip against the side of his chair. “You should congratulate yourself that you made it this far from Romulus. But you’re not going any farther.”

She lifts the sharp, pointed line of her right eyebrow. He stares her down. It’s hard to tell, with Romulans, but he’d put her in her early 20s, and there’s a certain air of youth about her, of inexperience, and if she looks at him like he’s no match for her it’s no more than a bluff, all the more daring for its transparency.

“Aren’t I?” she asks.

He laughs a light, false laugh, an act: he wants her to know she’s being funny.

“Captain Kirk,” she says, “you’ve had more than enough opportunity to immobilize or destroy my ship. But you haven’t.”

“As I said,” he shrugs. “Mercy.”

“Or curiosity?”

He runs his tongue over his lips and tilts his head, considers, even makes a bit of a show of it. “Are you making me an offer?” he asks. “Are you going to satiate that curiosity?”

He’s not sure if he’s slid into this tone, daring and flirting and reaching, defying, or if it’s slid into him. It’s smooth and sweet and travels down his throat like honey. The most adventure he used to get in Riverside was trying to seduce women who were too good for him, and he thinks only now that it was a good sort of practice for this, for space, for everyday danger, getting him used to living on his toes, getting him fit to balance this mask he wears across his true face. She’s not sure, she’s never sure, if she knows him, if he’s letting her in or only playing her. The ones he won over were always the ones just like him. This one is just like him. Ten years ago, the smile she’s giving him now would have undone him.

“We are on our way,” she says, and he’s gone again, a whole new game now, he wasn’t expecting this, “to offer aid to one of your allies.”

“Aid?”

“To New Vulcan,” she tells him, and she sounds very much like she’s about to give it all away. (She won’t.) His jaw sets, and tension freezes over him.

“What would a Romulan ship want on New Vulcan?” he asks. Even though he knows. He can guess. It doesn’t matter: he should have blasted her little ship out of the sky as soon as he saw it.

“Only to help them,” she insists. “You should be thanking us.”

“Why would the Empire want to help a Federation planet?”

“We do not represent the Empire,” she answers, and her words sound like no more than a blurred echo of Nero’s years-dead voice, and he feels the same sensation through him that he used to feel just before a satisfying fist fight. It’s too bad that she’s on her ship, and he’s on his. She’s crossed her arms against her chest and is tapping one long, sharp talon of a nail against her arm, watching him, waiting for him to boil. “The more important question, Captain Kirk,” she continues, “is why the Federation still insists on its charade of support for our brothers?”

“Vulcan is one of our founding members—”

“ _Vulcan_ ,” she sneers, “does not exist. You let it be destroyed—”

“By one of your people—”

“He was not one of us!”

He wasn’t expecting that she would break first. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised; he knows she is more volatile than he, or so is the rumor, so is the way they understand their own natures, and each other’s natures; so go their excuses. He doesn’t answer her at first. He imagines he can hear everyone on the bridge breathing, imagines he can feel them watching him, watching her. She takes a deep but subdued breath, forcing a gulp of air into her lungs, trying to stifle the movement of her shoulders as she does.

“The Vulcans,” she says finally, calmly; he doesn’t let his gaze waver and he’s proud to see she meets it, “are our family. The Federation has failed them. It would be in their best interest to join the Empire, to connect with their own people again before they die out completely thanks to your carelessness.”

A tumble of words seems to form an avalanche down to his mouth, but he holds them in tight behind his lips. He cannot get into childish arguments about what she does not understand, what she does not know, what she did not see or experience or what he did, a matter of no more than minutes before the destruction was complete, everything lost. He holds it all in. He pushes back from where he is still leaning against his chair, and starts to circle it, pacing, as if he were thinking, when all he is doing is gathering the strength to keep his voice as neutral and clear as it needs to be.

“I think the Vulcans,” he says, “know what is best for them.”

“Then you would agree they should hear our offer.”

“Your offer,” he repeats. He furrows his brows as if this honestly confused him. “Remind me again: this is the offer of…what, a dozen young Romulans, who don’t speak for the Empire, who cannot speak for the Empire because if they did, their very presence in this part of space would be constituted as an act of war and who are lucky than I’m not choosing to consider it one as it is?” He looks up, finally, again, and tells her, “You speak for no one and have nothing to offer. It is frankly amazing that you even made it this far—”

“Commander,” she finishes, catching how he stumbles where her name would be. She’s smiling at him, as if she still had some trick up her sleeve but it’s a bluff, as big a bluff as her title, he’s sure, and he leans with both hands on the back of his Captain’s chair.

“Commander,” he repeats.

He knows what he will say now but he waits, waits anyway, just staring at her. She doesn’t flinch.

“You should hope,” he says finally, eyes still on her to the very last word, “that the Federation is more inclined to mercy than the Empire. Sulu, pull them in.”


	4. Chapter 4

Spock wakes to a faint, unfamiliar buzzing sound, a tentative reverberation all around him. His head aches. He’s not sure where he is but that’s nothing new, wonders if he’s alone, or not, can only hope he is; he presses his hand tight over his eyes. Even before he opens them, he starts to come to, peeling away the layers of fog around his memories like peeling off the layers of a vegetable’s skin. Layers of confusion and confusion he throws away. What’s left at the end is Captain Kirk, only him, and he inspires such a swell of emotion that Spock’s not sure if he wants to kiss him or kill him, wherever he is, wherever he’s gone. He groans and rolls over and over until he falls onto the floor.

The room is empty. He remembers it now. The Captain’s quarters. He remembers, too, the way that Kirk looked at him, as if he knew him; he had that sort of tenderness to his expressions that only humans get and Spock had wondered what it meant and how anyone could look with such fondness at his strange half-defined face. He wonders now what else he’s forgotten and what he’d taken and if he’d gone too far, if too far was a possible thing—he told his father once that there was nowhere he wouldn’t see before he died. He’d see the whole fucking universe, somehow.

He stands up on somewhat shaky legs and tries to focus. It’s clear enough now that his speculation was for nothing, that this Captain Kirk doesn’t know him at all. If he did, he never would have left Spock alone in his room. What a joke, he thinks, and quirks his mouth up in the deformed half smile his mother hates. There’s a mirror in the corner, but he doesn’t look into it, to see what he might look like now or how he’s changed. He turns his attention to the computer instead, all the real knowledge there, everything he might want to know.

He’s a sloppy hacker, and his mission is exploratory, not focused. He skims through old logs, but they’re boring; he hardly picks anything up. He sifts through maps of the ship, old reports from engineering and the science division, and hops through the ship’s library, scanning over titles.

But it’s the communication channels that fascinate him the most. He jumps through empty channels at first, nothing but blank screens and quiet, boring and dull—he’s moving so quickly from one to the next that he almost misses her. He flips back. There. Oh. She’s something else, he sees that right away, all sharp points, and such perfect control—not the control of his father, too many razor edges for that, but she’s not giving up for anything, not giving anything up. He smiles when he sees her. It’s an instinct.

Spock has never met a Romulan before. But he’s heard plenty. They’re to blame, he hears often enough, those strange beings running wild on their planet, filled with anger and violence, no barriers and no controls and no boundaries. They’re to blame for this race prejudice, the tense Federation meetings, the under-breath insults against pointed ears and brows, the suspicion. They’re at fault. A part of him envies them, all the same. His father sees anarchy. He sees freedom. This woman, now, she’s young, not much older than he is, he’s sure, but she’s out in her ship and off in space. She’s where she wants to be and where she has no right to be. He’s jealous; he understands.

She’s smiling, when he first sees her. He doesn’t know at what. He can only hear her side of the conversation, but still, he knows that smile—he does not see it often, but he knows it. Vulcans do not smile like that, not even his few friends know how to smile like that. He thought it was the human in him that taught him how. She’s flirting. There’s an edge to it, yes, a certain danger, but it’s this he thrills to, this he wants, and he holds his breath when she starts to speak.

“We are on our way,” she says, “to offer aid to one of your allies.”

 _Fascinating_.

“To New Vulcan,” she clarifies, as if reading the question trilling along Spock’s thoughts. The words do nothing but unleash a new storm of queries. He does not notice the way he leans forward, the way his teeth worry at the inside of his lips. New Vulcan. New. A colony? A secret colony? What else do his people hide from him? She’s speaking of help still, her intentions so sweet there must be poison there. He doesn’t like her, doesn’t trust her, but he appreciates her, thee is at least that, the way that she rebels, not a part of the Empire, no, she’s saying, but she wants to ally herself with his people, and what bigger rebellion could there be? He’s on the edge of everything.

Then he falls.

“ _Vulcan_ does not exist. You let it be destroyed… He was not one of us!”

He watches the way her nostrils flare, the way her shoulders rise and fall with her deep breaths. He imagines her hands are balled into fists. _Does not exist_ , she’d said. The words don’t hurt. They leave him empty. They leave a hot, searing, pit in him, worse than their desert in the hottest of its seasons, more barren than their most desolate lands. _How does one destroy a planet_ , he wonders. He is not wondering how one could hate that much. He understands hatred. It is only logistics that crawl into this void in him. She’s talking but he hears nothing. There’s a whistling in his ears, the sound of water approaching a boil. Pinprick points jab at his skin. He’s blinded by this feeling, now, worse than the worst trip he’s ever been on, and this alone is how he knows it’s real.

It’s not possible, not possible, not possible, someone, some voice, is chanting to him. How could he not know—how could he have missed—were there any survivors? Is he the only one? Did this ship save him, does he have amnesia, are they afraid to tell him—afraid he’ll crack? But New Vulcan, New Vulcan—are they taking him there? How long was he out? And who— _not one of us_ —and she believes that any Vulcan would think twice before killing her, killing any of them, knowing they did this. How easy would it be to snap her neck, like an animal?

It scares him, even him, how easily he imagines it, and worse, worse, how satisfying it feels.

*

Jim leaves the bridge and goes, first thing, to check on Spock. His brain tells him that the kid will still be out like the dead, but something in his gut argues louder, chanting again and again, _what if he’s not? What then?_

The answer comes with the opening of the door, in the moment when he finds himself, so quickly that he has no time to think, pinned against the wall. It’s difficult to know what to do, so he tries to sound friendly, instead of shocked or angry or scared, any of which would be a more accurate description of his feelings at the moment. The two words that he manages sound painfully false, twisted around the inappropriate smile on his face.

“Spock,” he tries, “what—”

“Is everyone dead? Are my—” His voice breaks, just for a moment, and his eyes close like he can’t bear it, and then force themselves open. “Are my parents dead?”

“What are you talking about?"

“ _Vulcan_ ,” he growls, and slams Jim’s head back against the wall, as if he were no harder to throw around than an old ragdoll. “I heard her. I heard that—that—Romulan—I heard what she said. Vulcan is destroyed and you didn’t tell me. You thought I wouldn’t find out? You think I’m stupid?”

“No,” Jim answers. He’s putting all of his effort into controlling his voice, into not panicking, into seeming like he’s in control even though Spock’s hands at his shoulders have all but immobilized him. “I don’t think you’re stupid. And I’m sorry you had to hear about Vulcan that way—”

“It is true, then?”

Jim nods. He forces himself to watch Spock’s reaction, forces himself because somehow it seems obscene, invasive, to watch him so, but he has some strange idea about showing strength, not weakness, about looking like he has everything under control. It’s the only way he’ll be able to salvage the situation. More than that, it’s the only way Spock will respect him enough to come to him, because he’ll need him, when this truth he’d been hoping to deny settles in. 

Spock’s expressions are painful to watch. It is not only his sorrow, written boldly across every feature, and not only his anger, a fierce and sharp anger that sends a ghost of fear down Jim’s spine, and not even his desolation, such barren hopelessness, that get to him. It is the way Spock looks like he is drowning. It is the confused and lost expression in his eyes, and the way that it reminds Jim of his own Spock, and that man’s loss that Jim has never truly had to confront. He has never seen so clearly what his friend feels, never heard the way that hollowed out place inside him echoes. Spock’s control is too perfect; he has saved Jim from this knowledge of him, but here, in this younger version, and truly he is so young, Jim thinks, it’s so clear he all but feels it himself. It is terribly unfair, Jim finds himself thinking. The boy should not be put through this. It was never for him to know.

“The whole planet is gone?” Spock prods. His words are almost a dare, but one with no force behind it.

“Yes.”

“And the survivors—”

“Spock.” His own voice sounds like it’s about to crack into tears. He isn’t going to cry. He is nowhere close, in fact, to tears, but still it feels like something is choking him, like some unnamable emotion has taken away his voice.

“There weren’t any?”

“A few thousand. Your father was among them.”

He does not say anything more because anything more would be an insult. Spock lets him go. He takes one step back. Then Jim watches as he slowly sinks, as he seems to accordion down, folding over and over himself, until he’s on his knees with his hands covering his face and the tips of his ears still showing and burning a painful deep green. Jim steps forward, but doesn’t touch.

There’s a part of him saying he doesn’t have time to wait here, doesn’t have time to do what he is doing, which is sitting down next to Spock on the floor of his trashed quarters, and watching him, and holding his own hands tightly curled together in his lap to stop himself from reaching out and attempting just one comforting touch. He has a Romulan Commander to interrogate. This is why Starfleet would kill him if he and Spock were lovers. But it’s too late, really, for any of those fears, because what worries them, that their flagship’s Captain could put anyone or anything in front of his duty—that’s already happened. It’s happening right now.

When Spock speaks again his voice is hoarse and wet, as if with tears barely held back. He’s buried his face in the crook of one elbow, now, turned away from Jim. “Who did it?” he asks.

“That—that doesn’t matter now, Spock. He’s dead.”

“It does matter. Tell me.”

He shouldn’t just fold. He should know better than to cave beneath a hard edged tone and a tragic slump of thin shoulders, but he doesn’t. He tells Spock, “His name was Nero,” and tries not to let the image of that scarred and tattooed face haunt him.

“He was a Romulan?”

“He was.”

“Then why didn’t you kill her on sight?” Spock asks, and at the word “kill,” on the hard angle of the k, he lifts his head and turns his gaze to Jim once more, his eyes puffed and swollen and shot through with tiny green capillaries, and his expression hard and pitiless.

“She didn’t kill anyone, Spock—”

“She is one of them!”

He is shaking, looks just about like he could break, and Jim tries to take him in his arms on some sort of instinct. Spock pushes him away with a startling, explosive violence. It feels like being slugged in the face.

He forces himself to stand and step away. “It isn’t the policy of the Federation to kill Romulans on sight,” he says, as if this were some sort of reasoned conversation they were having, as if Spock cared about Federation policy or even Jim’s own opinions, his own feelings or codes. His words are dry and brittle. He is disgusted by their uselessness. 

“Then what good is the Federation?” Spock spits.

“We cannot hold her responsible for the crimes of another member of her planet,” Jim tries again, volume to his voice now to give it conviction and sharp edges. Spock is just a boy, just a misguided teenager like he was once, and he doesn’t know what he’s saying; it’s only his emotions talking, only his hurt. “She broke interplanetary law by crossing the neutral zone, and we’ve brought her and her crew onto the ship to deliver them to the proper authorities. But that is all we can do.”

“And by doing only that,” Spock answers, “they will know you are weak.”

He is looking up, now, at Jim with an expression on his face so cold and so heartless that Jim can hardly force himself to believe that this is really the same person he lives and works with every day, a man he’s more than once trusted with his life.

“Strength is not measured by brutality,” he tells him. “Someday you’ll learn that.”

*

There’s nothing more achingly _frustrating_ than not getting the last word, and when the Captain leaves he takes it with him, and locks Spock in those damned quarters again with only his anger and his wretchedness and no possible outlet for either. He’s already trashed the place. There’s no more satisfaction to be gained from such useless destruction. So he sits on the bed and holds his head in his hands for so long he loses track of all time, and it could be minutes or hours or days that he waits, unsure what he’s waiting for. For the Captain? For the pain to stop? For his mother? He laughs to himself, a sound and a feeling like spitting in an opponent’s face. He’ll be waiting a long time for that.

What he keeps telling himself, what he keeps hearing as if someone else were saying the words, just whispering them into his ear, is, _it’s never going to get better. Never. It’s all gone._

The thought makes him want to start breaking things again.

He starts pacing. The room is brightly, but artificially, lit, inevitably windowless, and there’s no way to tell what time it is or even what day it is. He hasn’t felt this disoriented since the first night he spent outside of his parents’ house. He doesn’t like to think of that night. So strange to think that those streets are gone, those rooms are gone, those people, almost certainly, gone; for a moment, it doesn’t even hurt, because it feels too unreal to hurt. His mind rebels against the information, then starts twisting itself up into convoluted curlicues and knots. The feeling is one of a burning between his ears.

He slams his hands against the door without thinking. He just needs to get out of this fucking cage.

The faintest of sounds, movements like the shifting of weight between feet, come through the thick metal door and tell him that he’s being guarded. The Captain’s quarters are more of a cage than he thought. Oh, but he should have known. He should have known they wouldn’t trust him.

 _Captain Kirk, Captain Kirk_ , he thinks to himself, shaking his head now and half smiling, because it’s all so clear now, what he must do. _You underestimate me._

*

Even more insulting, the guards are human men. It takes less time to subdue them than it did to hack the security system and unlock the door. He leaves their unconscious bodies on the Captain’s bed and then locks them in with a new code, a test of sorts of the Starfleet computer science program. Then he sets out.

He sees almost no one in the corridors, from which he gathers it’s the middle of the ship’s artificial night. He slips out of sight of the few security officers he does chance by before they have the opportunity to escort him back to his cell. He doesn’t have much of a plan and that’s risky, but he’s taken risks before, and bigger ones than this: at least in the past he had something to lose. 

All of the corridors look the same but he takes a mental note of each turn he takes, and of all of the hiding spots he passes, should he need to turn around fast and become scarce. Before long he has a decent map of this level of the ship in his mind, and when he finds himself face to face with a turbo lift, he doesn’t even think before he steps in. He travels one floor down for no reason, because he’s numb now, walking and turning and choosing on instinct, because why not one floor, why not down, why not.

When the doors open, the first thing he hears is a voice. Whoever she is, and he knows right away who she is, she’s whispering. He can’t make out the words. But an image comes immediately to him, sharp eyebrows and ears and nails and that thin smile like there’s something she knows that no one else will ever know, like there’s some power she possesses that no one will ever match. Even that faint murmur of her voice in his ear sets his anger flaring again, a bright white flash of it obliterating everything, and he follows the voice as if it were an ancient monster’s fierce seductive call.

There are guards, but he knocks them out with a pinch, and though she’s not alone in the cell, only one of her friends is awake and one look from her shuts his mouth, and so it might as well just be the two of them, alone. His blood is a war drum. He starts to step forward but she holds up one hand and tells him, sharply, “Don’t. There’s an invisible force field keeping us in.”

He follows her command on instinct, though even knowing she’s right his mind rebels at the thought of taking her orders. He watches the way she watches him. She’s trying to read him and she’s failing because she’s never seen a Vulcan who looks like him or dresses like him, has never been to his planet, never seen its underground, and at least he can take pride in this—he confuses her. She’s unsure of him.

“Who are you?” she asks him, lashing out her words like a whip, sudden and sharp. “What are you doing here?”

“Those are questions I should be asking you.”

She raises one eyebrow, and he sees the way her gaze traces down his frame, how she takes in the ring in his eyebrow, the set of his mouth, the line of his shoulders, how she follows the line of buttons on his shirt down, down.

“The answers to your questions are quite obvious,” she says. He hears the hint of disdain in her voice and it makes him want to lash out, but that instinct is tempered with the realization that her contempt is at least partly an act. She is trying to cover up how fascinating she finds him. “You see a Romulan, in military dress, in the brig of a Federation ship. Who do you think I am? You, on the other hand…are you some crew member’s rebellious teenage son?” 

Her glance falls to his hands, now balled into fists, and she smiles, almost a smirk. How easy it is, she must be thinking, to incite a reaction in him.

“All you need know of me,” he answers, “is that I am from Vulcan, a planet your people destroyed. You should consider yourself lucky that you are locked in that cell, or I would kill you with my bare hands.”

The amusement fades from her eyes as he speaks and she steps forward, only the invisible barrier of the cell wall separating them. She challenges him, “Even without the help of my men I could more than defend myself against you. Vulcans—pacifists—you are weak, all of you. You don’t remember what it’s like to have to fight for your own survival. And you, little boy, you’re worse than the rest of them. You speak with insulting ignorance, and pretend to defend your people even though I can tell just by looking at you that you’ve abandoned them.”

“You know nothing about me—”

“Your hair. Your clothes. The way you speak. What loyalty could you possibly have for your people?”

“Enough to know that when they are attacked, they must be avenged.”

“Vengeance! Yes!” There is a sudden, startling, giddiness to her voice as she repeats him, enough to force him one step back. “At least you understand that. But you have to direct all of that anger against the right targets.”

“I see the right target here in front of me,” he insists, but she only shakes her head at him again, and he’s sure if she wasn’t locked away she would be nose to nose with him. Even the thought, the fantasy of her breath on his cheek, her body so close he could touch, makes him shiver. He forces himself to keep her gaze.

“Listen to me,” she says. “Just for a moment. This is important. Nero wasn’t one of us. He was a Romulan, yes,” she concedes, “but he held no allegiance to any of us, nor we to him. We do not condone his actions. Why should we? The Federation are our enemies, that is true, but the people of Vulcan are our brothers and sisters.”

“Vulcan is part of the Federation,” he reminds her. “That makes us your enemies too.”

“You are our family first,” she answers. “That is the position that my crew and I take. Before our ship was captured, we were on our way to New Vulcan, hoping to persuade your people to ally with Romulus against the Federation.”

“You must be crazy. What reason would we ever have to join you?”

“What reason do you have to remain with the Federation? Tradition? Habit? Do not tell me loyalty.”

He hasn’t felt loyalty to anyone or anything in years, not since he was twelve, not since his father told him to choose between two heritages and he thought that he could, and he thought that it would be easy to be so simply and completely one thing. That was a type of loyalty, perhaps. Or a type of delusion. It broke away slowly, crumbled into bits that he brushed away, and now what he knows is freedom, doing what he wants because he wants it. That’s enough.

He meets her gaze as if he weren’t frightened of it.

“Loyalty,” she continues, “should not be given to people like them. Where was your Federation when Vulcan was destroyed?”

He does not know. He does not remember any of it. Too much has happened and none of it makes sense.

“They did not stop it. They barely tried. Only one ship was there and the most it could do was take in some of the survivors. The Federation is _weak_ , and what strength they do have, they are not using to protect your people. Why should they? They hate you.”

“They do not—” He tries to argue, though he knows arguments are useless when you can barely form your words through the hard grinding together of your teeth. No allegiance to Vulcan and no allegiance to Earth, that is what he used to believe, and what he used to say, to lovers who wrapped his tie around their fingers, who traced the line of his eyebrows—those touches made him flinch, at first. None of that matters now, none of those memories, none of those ghost touches. When the Romulan Commander says _They hate you_ he thinks of his human mother, who _loved_ him, who is gone, and everything in front of him washes out in reds.

“They do. They hate you. They distrust you. Don’t you see it in the way they look at you?”

Humans almost never look at him. He closes his eyes. He wants her voice to stop, he wants silence, he wants peace, but he doesn’t know how to find it. He’s thrown all of his training away. The first face, the first voice, that comes to his mind is the Captain’s, and he searches out his features for hatred or disdain, but the picture fuzzes and blurs in his mind’s eye before he can quite grasp it, before he can make any decisions.

“And where,” the Romulan Commander is asking, “did you learn to hate yourself?”

His eyes snap open.

“What do you mean?”

“Look at you. Look at how you dress.” She waves one hand gracefully, dismissively, at his untucked shirt, the holes in his jeans, his ratty shoes. “Why do you want to look like a Terran? You are stronger and smarter than any of them and yet you try to imitate them. That is quite illogical.”

“I do not want to be a Terran,” he tells her, and ignores the disbelieving look she gives him in response. “Nor do I want to be Vulcan. They are—we are—it is unnatural to be that way, repressed all the time, expending all of your energy keeping your emotions in check. It is too much effort wasted just to live a half life. Why are you smiling at me in that way?”

“I am smiling,” she answers, “because I think we could be great friends. Tell me your name.”

“Tell me yours.”

Her smile sharpens, at this, and she crosses her arms against her chest and turns away from him. She paces to the far end of the cell and then back, and as she walks, her crew mate’s eyes follow her. He’s been listening to their conversation silently, but attentively, a furrow between his brows and his glance, when it falls on Spock, distrustful and cutting. Spock has barely noticed him. He gives him a once over now. He’s broad shouldered and thuggish, clearly a follower—she told him to be silent when Spock came in and he hasn’t even considered disobeying her.

“Your mistake,” the Commander says now, with a sharp turn in Spock’s direction again; his eyes snap to her on instinct, “is in thinking that you will solve anything with your cheap imitation of Terran culture. Your people did not always live this half life that you spoke of. They were free once.”

“And you believe that we—that you, a small rogue ship of Romulans—could convince a whole people to reject thousands of years of tradition and the teachings ingrained in them since birth?” He raises both of his eyebrows at her and imitates, without meaning to, her position, crossed arms and uptilted chin and steady stare.

“If ever there was a time,” she answers simply, “when it would be possible, that time is now.”


	5. Chapter 5

She grabs his wrist suddenly. He turns. She is so close. Her eyes, gray from a distance, are the palest, weakest shade of blue up close; she smells like confinement and that unsettling, ambiguous space vessel scent. She can’t be placed. Her gaze flicks across his face, reading again, and her fingers press against his pulse point, an unsubtle gauging. He doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath.

*

Before he hacks the computer system, he stops. Clears his mind. Sets all the spinning details and theories and maybes down in a line and orders them, because he needs to understand everything, needs to be sure. It’s been so long since anything mattered. And she’s watching him through that one last invisible barrier, the only obstacle still in her way.

*

She won’t want to kiss like humans do. That’s what he’s thinking. But no, that’s wrong, she’ll want to try everything, experience everything. She’ll be curious. He can teach her, and she can remind him. She traces the side of his face with her fingertips and her touch feels cool and calming and she tells him, quietly, “Still your thoughts,” and he does.

*

Hacking the system will be simple. Computers are something he knows. He will let them out, the Commander and her twelve crew members, and they will take the phasers from the security guards Spock left unconscious by the door. They won’t have much time. The ship will alert her crew to the security breach. They know that. But it’s the middle of the night; they have the element of surprise; any opponent they meet will be a mere human, easily outsmarted and overpowered.

They will divide into three groups, and target the three most important rooms in the ship: six Romulans to the bridge, six to the transporter room, and the Commander and Spock to Engineering, and from there the whole ship will fall easily to their control. With it, they can fly to New Vulcan. Then—then—a challenge. He does not know what to expect, but he can’t admit it, not yet. One goal at a time. One step at a time. He knows that she is waiting for him.

 

*

“You must tell me everything,” he whispers low to her.

She quirks up one corner of her mouth.

“You don’t trust me?”

It’s too confusing, how he feels that he has always known her, and how he understands so sharply that he knows nothing of her, and so he pushes her back against the wall with two hands to her shoulders, sudden, rough, and violent. She doesn’t even flinch. It wasn’t distrust that made him speak, nor anger that made him act, only curiosity, and attraction, and need. His hands on her shoulders touch only cloth, and even when he reaches one hand, gently, a mirror of her gesture, to skim his fingertips across her cheek, still he feels nothing. She is sending him nothing. He closes his eyes.

“Romulans aren’t telepathic,” she reminds him, and closes her fingers around his fingers so hard that it hurts. He jerks his hand away. He feels his whole body jerk away.

“That is why you must _tell me_ ,” he growls.

Around them, the ship hums with a disconcerting, incongruous calm. Somewhere beyond their hearing, her men are taking over.

*

The bright bars of light marking the entrance to the cell flicker and blink off. She doesn’t look at him as she steps out, starts talking right away to the men she has roused from their sleep. Spock stands to the side; his body feels gangly and wrong.

They don’t break up right away. Spock teaches them the layout of the ship as he’s learned it, and they stop twice on their patrol through the level to take out four more security guards and grab their phasers. The Romulans would kill them, but Spock insists on simply knocking them out; he stores their bodies in side rooms and does not let himself feel regret. It’s too late for that, now.

*

What she tells him: she was a student at the military academy. In her spare time she read histories. She knows all about the Vulcans, she’s been wanting to meet them for years, but the school was too slow, and Romulus too small, and she needed so much more. She’s not really a Commander. She’d say, rather, a runaway. Her parents, her sister, most of her instructors—they don’t know where she is. She could be anywhere. She could be dead. And would they even believe it if they heard that she is here, in the Engineering room of a Federation flagship, with him, a Vulcan boy in Terran clothes, and as she speaks she holds up her hand, and he slides two fingers between her fingers. She is exquisite.

*

It’s over so quickly he could hardly say it had begun. The Engineering room was easy to take—his fingers, her gun, the shock of surprise—he thought it would be easy for all of them. But as his lips touch her lips the alarm bells start to sound, and it doesn’t matter how long they were careful, they’re caught now, and she’s pulling away from him. It’s over.

“Lock the doors!” she’s yelling, “Lock the doors!” 

He feels dazed and her voice is too loud even over the klaxons and they lock the doors, but they’re outnumbered now, more than outnumbered. The Captain’s voice comes through the walls and tells them it’s done. The others are captured. The Chief Engineer can override whatever changes they’ve made to the system and they can expect to be back in the brig in under an hour.

They make a slight effort to counteract the Engineer’s actions, but Spock knows it’s futile. His hands move, his brain whirrs, but he’s divorced from all of it, drifting farther and farther, so that when the doors open and he’s face to face with the Captain again, it’s like meeting a man in a dream. He meets his gaze but doesn’t speak. There is no reason to speak. To the Captain’s question—“What do you think you are doing?” spoken so softly it’s all but inaudible—there is simply no answer to give.

*

Kirk has the Commander brought to the conference room on level three, and while he waits, he sits alone with the lights on harsh and bright and lets himself feel as dark and as angry and as hurt as he wants. He’ll put it all away when she steps through the door.

He’d been asleep when the alarms went off, asleep and dreaming dreams he no longer recalls. He remembers that moment of waking, when his scattered unconscious crystallized, when everything became clear, a million shards of thought forming perfectly into a whole before his conscious self had even put together time and place and problem, and so he knew before he knew, his instincts were on, dragging him forward whether he wanted to move or not. Scotty’s people had the transporter room under control before he even got to the bridge. It was hardly a challenge, he thinks now. The Romulans, he’d learned, were military school dropouts, no match for the seasoned _Enterprise_ crew and they made dumb mistakes. Over before it started. In the records of the five year mission it will hardly be a footnote.

He doesn’t have a headache because of the Romulans. They aren’t the source of the sharp, stabbing red pain just above his left eye.

He tells himself it isn’t betrayal. No. He hadn’t convinced that kid of anything, and they have no history, and they do not love each other. What happened, whatever it was that just happened, is not _about him_ at all, it’s about Spock’s confusion and his pain, about thoughts Jim can’t read and emotions he can’t understand. But telling himself these things doesn’t mean he’s convinced himself of anything.

The doors slide open. She steps in, flanked by two guards and her hands secured behind her back. He stands up on instinct, like a gentleman would, even though he’s never been one and isn’t starting now.

She greets him with a question—“You wanted to speak to me, Captain?”—and a not quite smile. 

He dismisses the guards, then answers as casually as he can, his voice distant despite his efforts. He knows she can hear the strain beneath it. “I thought you might be wondering what’s going to happen to you now.”

“My vessel crossed into Federation space, and then my crew and I attempted to take over a Federation flagship. I believe I know what will happen to me. If our positions were reversed and this were Romulan space you would already be dead.”

“We’ll be taking you to Starbase 23,” he tells her, as if she hadn’t spoken. “It isn’t far. We should be there in a matter of hours. They can decide what to do with you and your crew there. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason for us to speak—”

“And yet you brought me here.”

“I just want to know if you honestly believed your plan would work.”

Finally, now, he looks at her. He waits for her to speak. But at first she only stares. He wants to know what she’s thinking, wants to scan through her thoughts, wants to know it all, as if knowledge were comfort, as if understanding were the salve to these strange, unexpected wounds.

“If I answer your question, you have to answer one of mine,” she says, at last, and quickly, a phaser stream of words pulled from behind her back. He laughs, short and frigid, in response.

“I don’t think you’re in a position to negotiate anything,” he answers.

He has a bit of sympathy for her, he does, he cannot help but, the way she looks down and looks defeated. She’s used to giving orders. Felt herself born for it. That’s why she left her Academy, why she jumped to the front of the line, and maybe he didn’t jump so much as he was thrust but he certainly cut ahead, and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit it had been, in one way or another, his plan since the day he enlisted. Ambition is one thing they have in common. He does not want to think what else they may share. But what is strangest is that, despite it all, he thinks he could have been her friend in another life.

“I wanted it to work,” she says. This isn’t an answer to his question but he’ll read between her lines; he has everything he needs to know, really, from how she avoids a true answer, and he’s prepared to let it go. But she continues anyway. “I thought it had a chance.”

“I’d be insulted,” he answers, “except I think your confidence has more to do with your trust in yourself than anything you might think of me or my crew.”

She doesn’t answer, but she looks him in the eye with insistent bravery.

“Ask me your question,” he says.

“Who is the Vulcan boy?”

Of course. He should have expected just that question, should have had his answer prepared. The trouble is that he was too busy wondering just the exact same thing. He can’t tell her the truth, but he feels he owes her more than a lie.

“He’s a survivor,” he says, finally. “He’s…confused, and he’s lost. Probably in more ways than either of us knows. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. It’s all I know myself.”

*

As a precaution, as much as out of sympathy, he orders Spock to be kept in one of the unused Ensign’s quarters, under heavy guard, instead of in the brig with the Romulans. He doesn’t expect Spock to see it as a favor, doesn’t expect anything from him but another trashed room and some insults. So when he commands the door of the room open and sees Spock sitting on the bed with his legs tucked beneath him and his eyes closed, he’s actually surprised. This quiet and familiar scene, this well-known silhouette, startles him more than he thought possible. He thought he’d seen everything. He thought he was beyond this subtle taking away of breath.

“Go away,” Spock tells him, without opening his eyes.

He walks over slowly, but doesn’t dare sit down.

“I thought you said you didn’t meditate,” he says.

“I’m not meditating.”

He’s half sure that Spock is lying, but then, he never did understand the finer points of the practice, so aloud he says only, “My mistake.” He doesn’t make any move to leave, and Spock doesn’t open his eyes or change his position. Still, the silence, the knowledge that Jim is standing there and watching him, seems to irritate him.

“What do you want?” he snaps.

“You tried to steal my ship. I thought a conversation might be in order.”

“I didn’t. She did. She wanted it.”

Jim sighs, such a long rush of breath he hadn’t even thought himself capable of breathing in that deeply, of forcing his lungs that full, and tells himself not to close his own eyes, not to get frustrated, not to view this as an argument. It is only a discussion. Still he wonders what he’s doing. Scotty, never sure of himself until he’s bending the laws of physics themselves, is uncharacteristically optimistic, almost eerily so; he says he almost has it, or has something—this Spock could be gone and his own version back in a matter of hours. So he tells himself. This whole mad adventure could be over soon.

That’s why he needs this conversation. That’s why he needs to find out what he can, while he can.

“And that you looked like her number one accomplice—that was just a misunderstanding?” he asks.

Spock’s head jerks, a sharp and involuntary movements, but his eyes stay stubbornly closed. “I know what I did,” he says. “You know, too. Leave me alone, Captain Kirk. There’s nothing I want from you.”

“And you haven’t considered the possibility that I may want something from you?”

“Like what?” Spock all but snorts, his lip curling up strangely. “Do you want me to explain myself? There is no reason I should. There is nothing you can do to me and no way you can threaten me. Do what you wish.”

Jim has his hands at his side, curled into fists he’d never use. He just needs to feel nails cut into skin. He just needs to ignore the feeling of a cord tightening slowly around his lungs. “I’m not here to threaten you,” he says, and that he’s saying these words, that he is actually forming these words, that he has to, is proof enough for him that this isn’t his Spock. His Spock would know by some deep imbedded instinct that Jim Kirk is always on his side.

“Not here to send me to jail?” Spock asks, like he doesn’t believe. “Not here to _punish_ me for what I _did_?”

“I’m here to ask you why you did it.”

Spock opens his eyes, finally, and looks up at Jim with a hard edged, forced defiance. He’s out of practice, Jim thinks, at hiding his feelings, because every single one is writ there, shining clearer than Jim has ever seen, on anyone. “Tell me what happens to me first,” he says.

The flow of sympathy through him loosens the cord, and he breathes deep and slow.

He walks over to sit next to Spock on the bed, not so close that they’re touching, but close enough for Spock to flinch. He pretends he does not notice that passing expression on his face, that pained, uncertain look. He lies easily, and tells himself it will be over soon, and he hopes this Spock will remember nothing of any of the day. “We’re sending you back to your Father,” he says, with a sigh as if this were not a story, made up as he goes along. “As soon as we get to New Vulcan, we’ll beam you down.”

“I’d rather you send me to jail,” Spock answers, “instead of telling him I tried to hijack a starship.” It’s the kind of thing Jim would have said with a laugh, but Spock is sober, and the flat tone of his voice makes him seem older, and more familiar in the same stroke.

“I wasn’t planning on telling him anything about that,” Jim says. He knows Spock is watching him, knows his gaze has snapped right to him, but he looks at the far wall instead, fingers laced casually between his knees and his voice deceptive and light.

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

He knows Spock won’t believe him, not at first, but the longer the pause stretches, the longer Spock waits for the however and doesn’t hear it, the more he will let himself slip into assurance. There’s a tension in the room, in the one-third lights, in the shadows on the anonymous blank walls, and he finds himself wishing Spock would fidget, would move just a finger as if such movement were a signal Jim could read. He knows what he’s hoping for but not what to expect, when Spock says, harsh and sudden and sharp, “I don’t know why I did it.”

Jim glances over to him, and sees that Spock is watching him as if daring him. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even frown.

“I went to visit her,” he continues, “and we spoke, and she made me think…that I owed them.”

“Owed who?” He finds it hard to imagine that even the Romulan Commander could convince Spock he owed her people anything, not when he’d been ready to kill her without question an hour before.

Spock shakes his head, and answers in a clear and slow tone, chastising Jim for his obliviousness. “Vulcan,” he says. “I owe it to Vulcan.”

“Spock—” He hesitates, and realizes he’s lifted his hand to place it on Spock’s shoulder. He drops it back down to his lap instead. “The Commander—she isn’t responsible for what happened. But she isn’t exactly one of the good guys either. And whatever you think you owe your people, it certainly isn’t the _Enterprise_.”

“It wasn’t about the _ship_ ,” Spock scoffs in answer. “It was—never mind, Captain Kirk, this is stupid, this is—” He grits his teeth, and stares out into the middle distance, hands twisting so hard against each other, Jim cannot believe the sensation isn’t painful. “She wanted to bring us back to how we were. I’ve been thinking about it and I know now, she was wrong, but I’ve been wrong, too, I’ve been…” These words come out in one great rush, flipping and rolling over each other. Jim just listens. “I’ve been something strange.”

Jim’s lips quirk up at the wording of this confession, but he forces his expression sober, glad that Spock didn’t see him slip. If Spock were an adult, the man he knows and can never stop thinking about, he’d try to joke. He’d say something like _Bones would agree_ or _We all are a little._ But this Spock is young and fragile and mourning and lost. He’s breathing shaky breaths. Jim waits until the movement of his shoulders up and down becomes smooth and steady before he pats Spock once between the shoulder blades. It’s no more than a friendly gesture but it’s too much; he should have thought before he did it, should have stopped himself again; Spock jerks under the touch and glares at him, like he’s trying something, like he’s taking advantage. He moves his hand away quickly.

“People have treated you terribly, haven’t they?” he asks.

“Only a few,” Spock answers. “And a part of me enjoyed it.” He shifts his legs underneath his body, retwisting them into some new and inexplicable pretzel shape, and then he adds, “I know I shouldn’t have—I’m glad you didn’t come here to lecture.”

“Ah, well,” he replies, slight sigh and slight smile, “I do hate to lecture.”

Spock doesn’t smile in return. He doesn’t say anything, and so, a certain silence stretches.

He notices only after minutes have passed that Spock has closed his eyes. He wonders where he is now, where he has wandered in that mind of his, if he is thinking about Vulcan or about the Romulans, perhaps, or about his family. In profile, his face not yet as sharp as the face Jim knows, and his eyelashes fluttering dark black lines against his skin, he looks almost peaceful. Jim has never seen his Spock look this way. He has never been allowed, he thinks, to see his Spock this way.

He jumps when he feels Spock’s hand on his wrist.

“I feel I should thank you,” Spock says quietly. Jim has the strong feeling, and he’s not sure if Spock is sending it to him or if he’s only reading it himself, in Spock’s posture, in the tone of his voice, that these words are only a cover, not what Spock means at all. He’s not quite sure what’s underneath. “I was expecting you to be angry. I still don’t…understand why you’re not.”

“Rebellion is only fun when you get a reaction,” he answers. “I don’t want to encourage you. Now you have to move your hand from my wrist.”

“Why?” He snaps the question back quickly, too quickly, his eyes open now and his grip, if anything, tighter.

Jim just shakes his head, disappointed and feeling too much like every father figure he’s ever let down. “Don’t tell me you need me to answer that question,” he says. “Come on, Spock. You know better than this—”

“You don’t know anything about me—”

“I know enough.” Spock might be right, that’s fair, that’s true, but it’s not a thought he can afford right now, not with desperate fingers hanging on bruise-tight to his wrist. “I know you’re smarter than to think that sex is the currency for everything.”

Spock scowls at him, looks so young, looks like he’s on the edge of an argument that he can’t quite piece together, and this is such a strange look on him that Jim finds himself jolted out of place yet again. Finally, Spock pulls his hand away. “But wouldn’t everything be easier if it were,” he says.

“Easier,” Jim repeats. “Maybe. But certainly not better.” Then, before Spock can question him or comment, he continues, “Spock, I think you will be glad to know that I have never encountered a bigger mystery than you.”

Spock considers, head tilted and the slightest narrowing of his eye, a familiar look that makes Jim want to smile. “Thank you,” he says. His brow furrows at Jim’s sudden, light laugh, and he feels bad for causing the boy confusion, but he couldn’t help it. That was his Spock in that voice, clear and true and enough to make him believe everything will be all right. Spock asks him what is so funny and he doesn’t know how to explain that it is not funny, nothing about this is funny at all, but he needs to laugh to lighten this persistent weight against his chest. It is amazing to him that it should work, how easy it is to right oneself again. In the pause that follows, he hangs his head, and then passes one hand slowly down his face.

“Captain Kirk,” Spock says again, insistent and loud this time, almost worried. “Captain Kirk, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Spock,” he answers. “Really. Just fine. And—for what the opinion is worth—I think you will be too.”

“I am sure,” Spock says, but his words are unpolished and dull and say clearly enough that he is not confident at all in the prediction.

*

“Give me the numbers,” Jim says, then licks his lips once, stealthily, because they are chapped and his throat is dry and his stomach is rolling unevenly.

“I—I don’ know that’s possible, Cap’n.” Scotty looks at least as nervous as Jim feels, which isn’t a comfort. “Engineering’s more of an art than a science—”

“Just tell me how worried I need to be, okay? What are the chances I’m getting my First Officer back, and what are the chances he’s going to turn into…I don’t know, a slug?”

“A slug? Well…small. The chances of that are small.”

Jim’s stomach takes another massive high-dive flip at this answer, because, positive though it may have been, it took Scotty just a few too many seconds of thinking to come up with it. The only response he has is a vague, awkward gesture, his hand palm out slowly closing into a fist before it hits, lightly, still painfully, the sharp edge of the transporter room console. His face squints together more in frustration than in agony.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Captain?” Uhura asks from behind him. “What if he is from an alternate universe? I know it isn’t your theory, but you’ve hardly disproved it and if we send him back with the knowledge of what happened to Vulcan—”

“Well we can hardly keep him, either, can we?” he snaps. He turns to look at her in the same movement, and her wide eyes and slightly open mouth, the utter surprise on her face, deflates him utterly. This is the second time in two days he’s lost it in front of his crew. He just hopes the damage can be undone, eventually. “It isn’t fair to him,” he says, more quietly this time, his voice a register below a normal volume now. “If he’s—if he’s from some other time, he needs to go back to it. If he’s our Spock we need him…we need him back to normal. I need him, okay? So I just—will he live?” He turns back to Scotty. He thinks he might actually be begging, this time. “That’s what I need to know. Will this kill him? Will this—experiment—kill him?”

He hates the word experiment, and it sounds vulgar on his lips. The only way he can do this, lie to that confused teenage kid who somehow, maybe, trusts him, take a risk with his life and his identity, is to think of this as a rescue.

Scotty takes a long moment to answer. Then he says, “It shouldn’t,” in a voice that isn’t quite confident.

“Shouldn’t,” Jim repeats. He glances over his shoulder again, at Uhura, watching him with her arms crossed tight against her chest and a certain set determination on her face, perhaps disapproval, and at Bones, who only meets Jim’s gaze for a moment before he turns away. Jim taps two fingers against the transporter, hard, the jolt of contact painful, and pretends that this is decisiveness. “I guess that will just have to be good enough,” he says.

*

Jim insists that the transporter room be cleared except for himself, Scotty, and Dr. McCoy, but even though he’s ordered the bare minimum of witnesses, still Spock eyes them warily as he walks into the room. Jim expects he’ll argue, but he only squares his shoulders and turns his back to them, and he doesn’t even lower his voice when he says, “So I guess we’re saying goodbye, now.”

“Yes,” he answers. “We are.” It’s partially a lie and partially the truth, but the words sound so stiff and stilted that he knows there’s no question they’re the wrong thing to say.

Spock has his hands buried deep in his pockets, his arms straightened and his shoulders hunched, as if he were cold. He shifts from one foot to the other. He looks like kids Jim knew in high school, the shy and quiet and studious ones, and nothing like the Spock he’s been flying around in space with for the last two years, nothing like the boy who stepped off the transporter pad yesterday, issuing challenges, hands formed into fists. If this is his Spock, if somehow this boy in front of him becomes his professional, intelligent, restrained, adventurous, curious, fascinating First Officer, then he knows what his job will be for the next three years. He’ll have to figure this man out. He’ll have to find again all of these sides of him, everything he wraps up and hides away.

“And you’re not—you’re not telling my father?” Spock asks. “About any of this?”

“No,” Jim promises. “It will be our secret, this time.”

“But if I find myself on your ship again and I do something stupid, it will be different.” He bobs his head back and forth with the words, as if reciting some old, well-worn mantra, of which he has long become bored.

Jim just smiles. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I promise, Spock, we’ll refrain from bringing you up onto our ship again without warning.”

Spock eyes him, brows leaning in over his nose. He glances to the transporter pad, then back at Jim. “That’s too bad,” he says.

Before Jim has a chance to answer, though what answer he could give, he doesn’t know, Spock has stepped past him and started to climb the two steps up to the pad. He steps carefully into place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if testing his ground, then fiddling with his sleeves, unsure how many times to roll up the cuffs. “I hate this, you know,” he says, mostly to his feet, but Jim steps forward anyway, the words a siren. “Going back to—to wherever I’m going. I think I prefer space to any planet.” He takes a long, sweeping look around the room, from the floor all the way up to its ceiling, before his eyes rest on Jim again. “Do you think Starfleet would ever be interested in someone like me?”

“You know Spock,” Jim smiles, “they just might be.”

Spock smiles an awkward, thin, smile back, as if he weren’t used to twisting his muscles in quite that way. His eyes flick over Jim’s shoulder, ready perhaps for Scotty to send him off, but then abruptly his focus shifts again and he says, the realization coming to him unexpectedly, “You never told me how you know who I am.”

“You’re right,” Jim answers. “I didn’t. But I’ll make you another promise, Spock. Next time we meet, I’ll tell you everything?”

“Next time?” he repeats, painful note of hope in his voice. _There will be a next time, then? ___

“Of course.”

He tells himself to savor this, to burn it into his memory, because he’s never going to see Spock smile so brilliantly like this again.

“I will remember you said that,” he vows, and Jim just nods. He almost hopes he doesn’t. He hopes that wherever Spock goes or whatever he becomes, he won’t have any memories of this strange day, of the moment he learned of the loss of his planet, of the Romulan Commander. But he doesn’t say any of this. He only steps back, once, twice, his eyes on Spock until the moment that he glances over his shoulder and gives Scotty the signal. Then he turns back to watch Spock’s body disintegrate into a series of minute white circles.

He is only gone a moment, but Jim’s lungs stop working and even his heart seems to stop beating, through the aching, uncertain silence.

Then there is his man again, his familiar First Officer, familiar clothes and expression and even familiar posture, for a second, until he crumples quite suddenly to the floor.


	6. Chapter 6

Bones keeps even Nurse Chapel—even Jim—from Spock’s bed in sickbay. He does take the first opportunity, however, to tell his Captain that Mr. Spock is fine, perfectly healthy. His biggest problem, according to the doctor, is that his body has gone through the tremendous strain of a rapid de-aging, and a similarly quick return to adulthood. But this is apparently the sort of malady from which one can expect a full recovery.

*

“Knock, knock,” Jim says, after he has already entered the room. “Is this a bad time?”

Spock is sitting on his bed with his legs tucked under him, the lights turned down to their lowest setting and only the crystals he keeps on his bedside table glowing. He looks just as Jim remembered him, just how he looked a day before, no new lines on his face or gray hairs on his head, but no younger either, no shorter, no ganglier. Jim knows this because he watched him carefully as he slept, when Bones finally let him into sickbay in the hours before Spock woke. Still, a part of him is wary even now, and he squints at his friend in the dim light. His eyes are closed, but he seems to sense Jim watching. His eyebrows rise, question or response Jim isn’t sure, then fall again.

“No,” he says. He slides over from the center of the bed, toward the pillows. “Please sit.”

He does, tentatively, leaving as much space between them as he can.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

While he waits for an answer, he watches the crystals, how the glow of them is unsteady, a flicker of it as if from a candle, wavering first through the base and climbing unsteadily to the tip, where it fades into a lighter blush as the bright glow starts again at the bottom. The sight is so hypnotizing, so distracting, that he misses the moment when Spock opens his eyes and turns to look at him.

“I have been better,” he admits. “However, Dr. McCoy assures me that my body should be functioning normally again soon. His exact words were ‘in no time,’ but I assume I was not to take that prediction literally.”

“A safe assumption,” Jim replies, and smiles because yes, this is the Spock that he knows.

“You are here to reprimand me for not returning to the ship with the rest of the landing party?”

He is here because he couldn’t stay away, because he had to see him, because he had to talk to him and listen to him and test him and make sure that he still knew him, Commander Spock, infuriating and fascinating and logical and brilliant and beautiful. The landing party, the thunderstorm, all of that might have been a lifetime ago. He doesn’t care about any of it, and almost says so. But instead he stops himself short and says, “Spock—”

Spock is watching him, waiting, questioning, and Jim feels a frown crease between his eyebrows. If the answer to his next question is yes, he’s not sure what he’ll do.

“Do you remember…anything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours?”

Spock nods slowly. “All of it,” he says.

“So it was…it was you? I mean, not an alternate universe you or anything like that but the…real you?”

“An alternate version of me would still, in some sense, be the _real_ me, as you know from your acquaintance with Ambassador Spock. However,” he adds, before Jim can even decide not to quibble this point, and uncurls his legs from under him with beautiful swiftness, “I understand your question. No, he was not a version of me from any other universe.” He’s stood now and paced forward, back to Jim and shoulders square and hands held together behind him. It is difficult to make out any details in the dim light, but Jim tries anyway, tries to trace the lines of him, make out the points of his ears, the cut of his hair, the way his fingers hook together at the small of his back and the way his elbows bend.

“If you don’t want to talk about this—”

“You wish to talk about it.”

He bites his lip, then darts his tongue out to run over the sharp spot of pain, the after effect of teeth sunk in too deep. “I do,” he admits. “I knew it was you—thought I knew, anyway. Doubted it sometimes. The rest of the crew didn’t believe me.”

“I would rather they continue under their false assumption.”

“Okay.” He answers quickly and by instinct, not sure if he’s surprised at Spock’s confession, or not, and if he is, if he has any right to the feeling. It’s a perfectly logical position to take. If his crew knew what Jim was like as a teenager, knew him before he pulled himself together, before he believed he could be anything more than a good-for-nothing and a waste, they would lose all of their respect for him. He couldn’t live with that. He can’t imagine Spock could either. Still, the thought of his First Officer requesting that he perpetuate a lie is jarring, at first. He thinks for a moment, and then says, “Dr. McCoy knows the truth—”

“He will keep the secret.”

It feels as if it’s been ages since Spock looked at him, since he could look carefully back at that face, and a sudden burn of frustration forces him to his feet. “Come on, Spock,” he says, one hand to one aching-straight shoulder. “Look at me. Really talk to me.” The shoulder refuses to give, Spock like stone facing away from him. “I’m your friend, I’m—I’m still your friend, all right?” The last words come out quiet, whispered like a secret in the dim evening-light of the room. If you think that I think of you differently now, I don’t.”

“Of course you do,” Spock says. His shoulders don’t relax, and neither does his posture, and still he does not look Jim in the eye, but he does turn around. “It is only logical that your judgment of me should change now that you have more data with which to form your opinions.”

“No, I don’t believe that.” He shakes his head decisively. “The past is the past. I certainly don’t want anyone judging me on mine.”

Spock seems to have no answer to this. He is not even looking at Jim, has his gaze set stubbornly just beyond his shoulder. Jim reaches out to take his wrist, an awkward and instinctual movement, because he feels somehow the deep necessity of touch, but Spock flinches at the contact. He remembers his own reaction to the teenage Spock’s advances, and though he knows this isn’t the same, isn’t remotely the same, the flash of confusion and guilt he feels makes him move his hand away quickly.

“You really remember it all?” he asks. He’d meant to offer more assurances, mix in some platitudes, some declarations Spock would never believe and promises Spock would never hold him to. But the question comes out instead. Spock is less surprised than he is to hear it.

“As well as you do,” he says, and then, stepping past Jim, walking away from him, “Jim, I must apologize for my actions. I acted completely inappropriately with you—”

“You weren’t yourself.” He pivots, eyes following Spock’s restless movements. “You didn’t mean—”

“I did. I was sixteen years old and knew well that my advances to you were wrong. There is no excuse.”

Spock’s ears are tipped a violent, dark green, and he looks more uncomfortable than Jim has ever seen him look. He wishes he could explain that he’s not angry, that he places no blame on Spock, that he’s willing to forget any of it ever happened, or act as if he forgot—but he knows that none of this matters. Spock will remember. Spock blames himself. That’s the real problem, and it’s one Jim isn’t able to solve.

“There is no excuse for my actions with the Commander of the Romulan vessel either,” Spock continues. He’s standing with only his profile visible, stiff military stance still, as if he were giving a report of his misbehavior to a senior officer, not sharing with a friend. “At that age, it was enough to know that an action was forbidden for me to wish to pursue it. In addition, I rarely found it necessary to think my actions through to their logical conclusion.”

“I could tell,” Jim says, to show that he’s still listening. He knows that Spock isn’t done talking, not yet, that these words have been long buried. He’s sifting through memories he hasn’t brought to light for fifteen years.

“Not long before my sixteenth birthday,” he says, slowly, and only after several more moments have passed, “I—discovered an example of hypocrisy in my culture. It disillusioned me. I saw that there was what I believe you would call an underground culture in my home that encouraged every vice I had been taught to spurn in my childhood. I did not realize that this subculture was small, or that its members were the most hurt and desperate of my society. Many of them would eventually leave the planet. I believed I had exposed the secret heart of my people, and that it was rotten and ugly. Do you understand, Jim?” His eyes, long closed as he spoke, flutter open and seek out Jim’s own. 

“Previously, I had wished to give up my human heritage, to be the perfect Vulcan. I thought my discovery meant that such an achievement was worthless. I turned away from my father’s people entirely.

Much of the Vulcan underground, at least at that time, was concerned with Terran culture, fashion, language, and ideas. I followed these trends. I—” he falters, and their gaze breaks, Spock’s head now downtilted once more. “I believe my younger self informed you of my other activities at that time. I am not proud of them.”

“I understand that,” Jim answers. “But—Spock do you ever think about it in terms of what was done to you? If there were men in this…underground who thought it was okay to—I mean, you were only sixteen, that was—”

“It is behind me now,” Spock interrupts swiftly.

“Is it?”

Spock’s gaze snaps up on instinct at the command of Jim’s voice, and he meets Jim’s stern-Captain stare with a defiant look of his own. He doesn’t answer, only remains impassive, stubborn and set, hiding again all of the details of that past that Jim had never thought to ask about before. He thought he understood Spock completely. He thought he could put together the pieces of who he was from who he is, and that the puzzle was a straightforward one, edges easily matched into edges. He sees now that it more complicated than he thought. He only wants to rise to the challenge.

“They took advantage of you,” he says. “They used you.”

The words make Spock flinch, the tiniest tick of his facial features, and if Jim weren’t watching him so carefully he would have missed this minute shift in expression completely. He takes a step forward, and Spock does not step back.

“That kid I saw yesterday, the one I spoke to, he was so desperate for someone to know him, and I—I know something of what that’s like. The only way he knew how to feign closeness was through sex. What did you really want from your flirtation with Earth ways, Spock? Companionship? Intimacy? That’s not what those men were offering you.”

“I am well aware, Captain Kirk,” Spock answers. His head is bowed now, his manner stiff and formal and his voice distant, stretching the space between them. “If you wished to make a speech to that effect, you should have done so before Engineer Scott fixed the transporter and returned me to my current age. And if you are implying that I have never learned the difference between my relationships with ‘those men,’ as you call them, and true affection, you are mistaken. Those events are over ten years in the past.”

“And you’re saying that they didn’t have any sort of lasting effect on you?” He searches Spock’s blank, impassive face, and remembers how every emotion he felt flickered over the features of his sixteen year old self. “We’re all haunted by our past, in one way or another.”

Spock only arches his eyebrow and tilts his head, a searching, invasive stare. Like being undressed, like having your very skin pulled back and your muscles and bones examined. Jim looks away first.

“In my experience,” Spock tells him, “humans are constantly looking for a reason why I am, by their standards, detached. They think I am cold. I am not reserved and careful now because of my experiences as an adolescent, Captain. I am reserved because it is how I was taught to be, and how I always should have been. It is how I stay in control. If I am not in control, I become a danger to myself and others. That is the simplest and most straightforward ‘explanation’ I can offer you.”

“Okay,” Jim answers. It’s a fair answer, he knows that. He looks down at their feet, just a few steps distant from each other. “It doesn’t explain, though,” he adds, gaze lifted back to Spock’s face now, undeterred, “why you are so reticent with me.”

Spock paces away from him. He walks to the opposite end of his room, back to Jim, speaking quiet and low as he does, “Neither you nor I have a promising history with relationships. You were primarily known among your fellow students at the Academy as a man who would engage in short term sexual relationships with your classmates and then end those relationships—”

“Okay, so I haven’t always been the best boyfriend. I can change that—”

“And you have offered?” Spock turns on his heel abruptly on this sentence, face to face with Jim again and the room between them. “Your intentions have hardly been clear.”

“Well, yours seemed pretty crystal to me.”

They sound like they’re attacking each other. Still, at these last words, Spock’s shoulders bend; he seems suddenly and unexpectedly defeated. “I am not a machine,” he says. “However, even if you were willing—”

“I am willing.”

“To pursue a long-term romantic, and not merely sexual, relationship with me, there is no guarantee that it would be successful, and in the event of a failure your ability to command this vessel would be severely compromised.”

Jim does not answer, and eventually, Spock walks the few steps to his bed and sits down again, just at the corner. “Do not tell me you have not considered these consequences,” he says.

“I have.” He sits down too. “But I came to the conclusion that the risk was worth it.”

He waits a long time, anticipating Spock’s answer, if he will conclude, too, the truth of that old cliché about worthwhile things necessitating risk.

All he says, though, finally, is, “You are a reckless man, Jim Kirk.”

“Rebellious, maybe,” he answers. Quite suddenly, inexplicably, he wants to laugh. “Like somebody else I know.”

Spock quirks an eyebrow at him. “Perhaps in the past, but I—”

“No. I think you still have some of that in you, some rebellion. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

“With you,” Spock repeats. His voice is low, quiet, barely audible, as if he were doing no more than speaking to himself, but still Jim feels it rumbling low down his spine. The gentle thrum of it reminds him of the moment of their kiss, those seconds of perfect and endless potential when he believed in them like he believed in the floor of his ship beneath their feet, solid and real and necessary, simply and undeniably true.

“Yes,” he says. “With me on this ship. Exploring the universe.”

Spock nods slowly. He repeats the word again, “Yes.” He shifts closer, dream movement that makes Jim want to shake his brain free of cobwebs and fantasies, it does not seem real, does not seem possible that Spock is the one closing the gap between them, and then he notices that his leg is touching Spock’s leg, true feeling of body against body. “Perhaps you are correct,” Spock says. “Perhaps I have not distanced myself as much as I believed from my own past.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

Spock’s hand grips his wrist. The touch is, at first, harsh and frantic, a man about to drown looking for someone to rescue him. Then it relaxes. Jim fights the urge to twist under the grip, manipulate their hands until palm presses palm and fingers twine.

“No.”

*

They don’t decide, yet, what this means. That takes time.

*

Bones asks him over breakfast what has gotten into him recently, and he asks, “What are you talking about now?” in return because, really, he’s been good.

“You seem very calm recently,” Bones tells him, and narrows his eyes. “Suspiciously calm.”

Jim pokes at his eggs with his fork. Space eggs, always dry. “I guess I’ve had enough excitement for a while,” he answers, in the innocent voice he perfected in high school, and gives an oh well shrug.

Bones is still watching him, thinking, analyzing. Then he asks suddenly, quickly, not as if the idea had suddenly occurred but as if he had suddenly decided to voice it, “Are you and Spock—?”

“No comment.”

*

He is still, of course, Jim Kirk, and his desire for new experiences, his need to encounter the unknown, remain among his defining characteristics. Sometimes, he still needs to take chances. He enjoys the sharp taste of danger encountered, skirted, survived.

*

It is a risk to spend nights in the First Officer’s quarters. To show up in the evening, in what passes for an evening on a ship, for chess and never leave. To sit very still, hand up, palm out, as Spock teaches him how Vulcans kiss. To use tongue and lips and fingertips to trace nose and collarbone and hips. To fall asleep in a mess of tangled up limbs. Closeness like this is always a risk. But one they both take gladly.


End file.
